The Onomastics of Roman Citizenship in the Greek East

Abstract

AbstractNames are fundamental for assessing the spread of Roman citizenship in the empire. The eastern provinces during the long second century CE saw an increase in the number of Greek-speaking individuals enfranchised—rhetors, athletes, soldiers, and even procurators. This chapter seeks to study both the ways in which Roman nomenclature was locally adopted by the new citizens and how socially significant the display of their names might be in the epigraphic and literary materials of the period. Instead of using onomastics as an index of status to be instrumentalized by historians, the chapter proposes analyzing this phenomenon as a cultural practice that is accommodated to different contexts and helps to illuminate what citizenship meant to some of those who possessed it.