Some famous people got additional names, agnomina, such as "Africanus". And Roman emperors were later known for inflationary use of such designations. You could

Some famous people got additional names, agnomina, such as "Africanus". And Roman emperors were later known for inflationary use of such designations. You could run a minor campaign on the Rhine and call yourself Germanicus for example. The whole part about the Roman naming system indicating heritage became even more complicated when Caracalla (properly named Marcus Aurelius Antoninus) made every free man in the Empire a Roman citizen and now basically everyone was called "Marcus Aurelius" without ever having had any ties to the Aurelii family.