sons, or that the elder sons had children of their own. Brutus is also known to have had a brother, who was put to death by his uncle the king, and there may have been other relatives. Moreover, Niebuhr raised the possibility that Brutus himself was a plebeian. But even if he had been a patrician, as the weight of tradition holds, his descendants may still have gone over to the plebeians. The name of Brutus is said to have been given to Lucius because he feigned idiocy after the execution of his brother, in hope of avoiding the same fate. However, his father is also referred to as Brutus by the ancient authorities, and while this may have come about merely for narrative convenience, it is possible that the surname had already been borne by the family for some time. According to Festus, the older meaning of the adjective brutus was "serious" or "grave", in which case the surname is much the same as Severus. A less probable explanation suggests a common origin with the name with that of the Bruttii, a people of southern Italy who broke away from the Samnites in the fourth century BC, and whose name is said to have meant, "runaway slaves". The surname Bubulcus refers to one who plows with oxen. The only persons known to have borne this cognomen also bore that of Brutus, and therefore may have belonged to that family, rather than a distinct stirps of the Junia gens. If so, the Bubulci were the only members of the family to use the praenomen Gaius. They appear in history during the Second Samnite War, at the same time as the other Junii Bruti emerge from two centuries of obscurity, with the agnomen Scaeva. This suggests that the family may have split into two distinct branches about this time. The origin of the cognomen Pera, which appears in the middle of the third century BC, is not known, but the filiations of the two Perae suggest that they may have been descended from the Junii Bruti. Pennus, also a surname of the Quinctia gens, is probably derived from a Latin adjective meaning "sharp". This family flourished for about a century from the time of the Second Punic War. The surname Gracchanus was assumed by one of the Junii in the latter part of the second century BC, on account of his