Eponym

An eponym is a person, whether real or fictitious, whose name has (or is thought to have) given rise to the name of a particular place, tribe, discovery, or other item. An eponymous person is the same as an eponym. In contemporary English, the term "eponymous" is often used to mean "self-titled." The word eponym can also be used for the thing titled.

Political eponyms of time periods

In different cultures, time periods have often been named after the person who ruled during that period.

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• One of the first cases of eponymity occurred in the second millennium BC, when the Assyrians named each year after a high official (limmu).
• In ancient Greece, the eponym archon was the highest magistrate in Athens. The Archon of Athens had a yearly charge and each year was named after the elected one (e.g., the year 594 BC was named after Solon).
• In Rome, the two annual consuls, as formal chief magistrates of the Roman republic (never constitutionally abolished, so still formally the joint heads of government even under the 'political' reality of empire, both principate and dominate) gave both their names -regardless whether either one was reelected- to the year they were in office, this being the formal way of dating, alongside the 'Ab Urbe Condita' continuous year ordinal (starting from the mythical date of the founding of Rome), the Greek Olympiad or even the rather pointless fiscal indiction (yet a tradition long surviving the Roman empire).

:Famously, when the future dictator for life Julius Caesar was in office with an entirely insignificant political colleague, the jocular phrase was 'the consulate of Julius AND Caesar'. Emperors would often be elected consul, some even repeatedly, but never had an automatic right to be eponymous.

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• Even well in the Christian era, dating eponymously by reign-years (the first, 2nd etc year of a named monarch) was not uncommon in various chanceries, especially at the court of a prince aspiring pivotal importance to his entire state's society, and was copied by minor dignitaries, even prelates. But the church, carefully presenting God as the supreme monarch above all mortal rulers (at times with some success in positioning its ecclesiastic head, the pope, as his vicegerent on earth - sovereigns as John Lackland of England recognized him as their suzerain, the Holy Roman Emperor's refusal to do so being the ideological stake of the medieval so-called Investiture conflict), would succeed in imposing first on the public, and ultimately on all royal scripts, the 'neutral' dating AD.