Gaius Julius Caesar had an aunt, two sisters, a daughter, and a granddaughter all of whom were named Julia Caesaris. This is an odd fact I learned during my Latin class a few weeks ago, and so I investigated. For a great period of Roman history, most men had three names, in a style known as the tria nomina. The praenomen usually came from a small list of names, each of which are easily recognizable by an initial in literary references (Gaius [C.], Marcus [M.], Publius [P.], etc.). The second part, the nomen, established the family or gens an individual came from (Julius, Tulius, Ovidius). The last part, the cognomen (Caesar, Cicero, Naso, etc.), began as a nickname but eventually became hereditary. In some records, only the cognomen was recorded without much other identification . So how did the women end up with a diminutive version of the male names? In the earliest periods of Roman history, women also had praenomina, such as Tiberia, Lucia, or Gaia, which could also be abbreviated with a single initial. However, for a variety of reasons, female praenomina fell out of fashion by the end of the Republic (Caesar’s era), and therefore most women came to be known only by their nomina or cognomina, both of which often came from a feminized form of a masculine name. This is how so many female members of his family came to be known by the name Julia Caesaris, and because most of them were on different levels of their family tree, they were distinguished by the names of their fathers or husbands. However, because Julius Caesar had two sisters instead of just one, those two were known as Julia Major and Julia Minor, to distinguish them. If there were a third sister, the three siblings would have been known as Julia Prima, Secunda, and Tertia respectively.