How did Romans address their children, their parents, their slaves, and their patrons? When one Roman called another ''dearest,'' ''master,'' ''brother,'' ''human being,'' ''executioner,'' or ''soft little cheese,'' what did these terms really mean and why? This book brings to bear on such questions a corpus of 15,441 addresses spanning four centuries, drawn from literary prose, poetry, letters, inscriptions, ostraca, and papyri and analyzed using recent work in sociolinguistics. Including a glossary of the 500 most common addresses and quick-reference tables explaining the rules of usage, this original and highly readable work will be enjoyed even by those with no prior knowledge of Latin.