an imaginary father, as if they were legitimate; thus in the above inscription, Allius is styled L.f., though his real father's name was Gnaeus.
The same fashion of nomenclature is met with sporadically among the written curses (deuotiones) which have come down to us in considerable numbers. Here it is perhaps just possible that the writers are influenced by the ways of some matrilinear race—the Etruscans, it may be be, or some Asiatic people.[1] But as the name of the mother is by no means invariably given, little stress can be laid upon this.
It is just worth mentioning that we have names of the form "Tom Susanson" given now and then to people of whose legitimacy we are in no doubt. I have come across two examples in Cicero, and no doubt there are more to be found there and elsewhere. Writing to Atticus (ad Att. V. 21. 14), he has occasion to mention their common friend, Servius Sulpicius, to whom he was thinking of betrothing his daughter Tullia. He calls him here "son of Postumia." But he had his reasons for not writing too openly just then; the matter was, as he says, a family secret, and he was fond of little mystifications with regard to names. In another passage, xii. 24. 2, he uses a similar phrase of a historical character. "Can you tell me," he says, "whether P. Crassus, the son of Venuleia, died in the lifetime of his father, P. Crassus the ex-consul, or afterwards?" But it is natural enough in speaking of a rather obscure person with a very common name to give all possible particulars about him.
For completeness' sake we may add an instance, although it is hardly more than a legend, of a boy being named after
- ↑ It may be that we have this form of name in the curious Oscan document known as the Curse of Vibia (Conway, 130), in which the latest commentator, Buck, would translate the phrase ualaimas puklui as "son of Valaema." But the interpretation is very doubtful, and neither Conway nor Bücheler takes it in this sense. The formula of the curse is probably very old, and such formulae may enshrine sociological ideas quite foreign to the actual writer.
