Adrian

The Roman emperor Hadrian built a wall across northern Britain and a villa outside Tivoli, both of which you can still walk, and the name that descends from him, Adrian, means a man from Adria, a town on the Adriatic coast whose waters give the sea its name. Six popes have worn it. Adrian Brody won an Oscar at twenty-nine; Rocky Balboa shouted it up a Philadelphia staircase. The name has drifted steadily in the American top hundred for decades, boosted by its Latin American popularity. It currently ranks 72 and is given to about one in 372 boys. Two syllables that sound like Roman mosaic and middle-school cool at once.