 The descendants of those who had been granted citizenship by the "Constitutio Antoniniana" seem to have dispensed with praenomina altogether, and by the end of the western empire, only the oldest Roman families continued to use them.The "nomen gentilicium", or "gentile name", designated a Roman citizen as a member of a gens.A gens, which may be translated as "race", "family", or "clan", constituted an extended Roman family, all of whom shared the same nomen, and claimed descent from a common ancestor.