I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire
Driving home from work one day, I wanted to know how many people we knew the names of who lived during the Roman era. Searching around, I found lists of Consuls and officials, but nothing that covered ordinary people or even most people like freedmen and slaves. So I ended up building a pipeline to process the more than 500k Latin inscriptions in the Epigraphic Database Clauss-Slaby https://edcs.hist.uzh.ch/en/ and extract the names of people (and attempt to cluster them, but this is a work in progress). There are databases where Classicists have done this manually for…
I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire launched on June 10, 2026 with 210 votes, #138 of 22,647 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches.
In plain words
This tool extracts and maps names of people from over 500,000 Latin inscriptions in the Epigraphic Database Clauss-Slaby to create a comprehensive record of individuals who lived during the Roman Empire. It targets researchers, classicists, and history enthusiasts seeking data beyond lists of officials and consuls, including ordinary people, freedmen, and slaves. The project processes inscriptions automatically and attempts to cluster names, filling a gap where manual databases only cover specific regions.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
This map visualises inscriptions from the Epigraphic Database Clauss-Slaby (EDCS) that record personal names. For each inscription an AI pipeline attempts to identify individuals and extract their praenomen , nomen , cognomen , status, and gender. Zoom in to explore individual inscriptions. Click any marker to see the people recorded on it, the inscription text, and (where available) a translation and summary. Use the search bar and filters to narrow down what you see. Prefer to search by name, province, or date? Use the Search / Browse interface to query the database directly, filter results, and export data as CSV or JSON. Name extraction is roughly 80–85% accurate. Errors are inevitable…from new.roman-names.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
Driving home from work one day, I wanted to know how many people we knew the names of who lived during the Roman era. Searching around, I found lists of Consuls and officials, but nothing that covered ordinary people or even most people like freedmen and slaves. So I ended up building a pipeline to process the more…
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