Caesar (cognomen)

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Caesar was a Roman cognom whose most famous bearer was the 44 BC. Was the murdered dictator Gaius Iulius Caesar . During the Roman imperial period it developed into a title of the Roman emperors (see Caesar (title) ), from which the rulers' titles emperor and tsar were derived. The female carriers of this cognomen were usually called Iulia Caesaris .

origin

According to the Roman writer Pliny , the name “Caesar” is derived from the past participle of the Latin word caedere (“cut out, cut down, cut down, kill”), caesus (“cut”). In the context of the Roman law lex reginus or lex caesarea , according to which pregnant women who died during childbirth should have the child cut out of the womb , the name is interpreted as "the one cut out of the womb" ( ancient Greek καίω "cut") . However, this has little in common with the resulting loan translation Caesarean section , because the aim of this operation was less to save the child than to be able to bury it separately from the mother. Consequently, it can be assumed that an early ancestor of Gaius Julius Caesar was associated with such an intervention and that the name is derived from this.

The suffix -ar is otherwise completely unknown in the Latin naming context. One could therefore consider the derivation of the name preferred by the dictator Gaius Julius Caesar himself to be more likely. This, according to one of Caesar's ancestors in killing the First Punic War an elephant and received for this act nicknamed Caesar - the Punic word for elephant. Coins from Caesar's time with the elephant as heraldic animal have been preserved.

Name bearer

literature