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Sosia gens

Roman gens

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMar 2, 2023
Entity authorityQ470960
Source-derived summary

The gens Sosia, occasionally written Sossia, was a plebeian family at ancient Rome. Members of this gens occur in history from the end of the Republic down to the third century AD. The first of the Sosii to attain the consulship was Gaius Sosius in 32 BC, and the family would continue holding various positions in the Roman state until the third century.

Praenomina

The praenomina associated with the Sosii of the Republic were Quintus, Titus and Gaius. The Sosii Falcones of imperial times used Quintus and Marcus. All of these were extremely common throughout Roman history.

Branches and cognomina

The original Italian members of the gens were probably of Picentine origin. A distinct family of Sosii appears prominently in the Senate during the reign of Emperor Domitian onward, and its progenitors seem to have been easterners. It is likely that an ancestor of theirs received Roman citizenship from Gaius Sosius, when the latter had served as governor of Syria and Cilicia during the time of the Second Triumvirate.

The Sosii of the Republic bore no cognomina, and were not divided into distinct families. In the second century, however, a family bearing the name of Sosius Falco appears, descended from a daughter of Quintus Sosius Senecio, consul in AD 99 and 107, who married Quintus Pompeius Falco, consul in 109.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Sosia gens” as roman gens. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Sosia, gens and Roman.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current 220-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Sosia, gens and Roman providing the first useful test.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 2, 2023. The linked authority identifier is Q470960. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

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This entry incorporates text from Sosia gens” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.