Gaius Iulius Caesar (name) - The cognomen Caesar

The cognomen Caesar

In earlier times Caesar could originally have been a praenomen. The suffix –ar was highly unusual for the Latin language, which might imply a non-Latin origin of the name. The etymology of the name Caesar is still unknown and was subject to many interpretations even in antiquity. Julius Caesar himself propagated the derivation from the elephant, an animal that was said to have been called caesai in the "Moorish", i.e. probably Punic language, thereby following the claims of his family that they inherited the cognomen from an ancestor, who had received the name after killing an elephant, possibly during the first Punic War. Since the Gauls came to know the elephant through the Punic commander Hannibal, it is possible that the animal was also known under the name caesar or caesai in Gaul. Caesar used the animal during his conquest of Gaul and probably of Britain, which is further supported by the inclusion of forty elephants on the first day of Caesar's Gallic triumph in Rome. Caesar displayed an elephant above the name on his first denarius, which he probably had minted while still in Gallia Cisalpina. Apart from using the elephant as a claim for extraordinary political power in Rome, the coin is an unmasked allusion to this etymology of the name and directly identifies Caesar with the elephant, because the animal treads a Gallic serpent-horn, the carnyx, as a symbolic depiction of Caesar's own victory.

Several other interpretations were propagated in antiquity, all of which remain highly doubtful:

• a caesiis oculis ("because of the blue eyes"): Caesar's eyes were black, but since the despotic dictator Sulla had had blue eyes, this interpretation might have been created as part of the anti-Caesarian propaganda in order to present Caesar as a tyrant.
• a caesaries ("because of the hair"): Since Caesar was balding, this interpretation might have been part of the anti-Caesarian mockery.
• a caeso matris utero ("born by Caesarean section"): In theory this might go back to an unknown Julian ancestor who was born in this way. On the other hand it could also have been part of the anti-Caesarian propaganda, because in the eyes of the Republicans Caesar had defiled the Roman "motherland", which was also reported for one of Caesar's dreams, in which he committed incest with his mother, i.e. the earth.

Another interpretation of Caesar deriving from the verb caedere ("to cut") could theoretically have originated in the argument of the Julians for receiving a sodality of the Lupercalia, the luperci Iulii (or Iuliani). Since the praenomen Kaeso (or Caeso) was at first a proprietary name of the Quinctii and the Fabii, possibly derived from their ritual duty of striking with the goat-skin (februis caedere) at the luperci Quinctiales and the luperci Fabiani respectively, the Julians would then have argued that the name Caesar was identical to the Quinctian and Fabian Kaeso. The identification of the cognomina Kaeso and Caesar was indeed supposed by Pliny, but is—according to Alföldi (1975)—unwarranted.