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An appositive, grammatically incomplete, is always set off by commas, a reader-friendly invention, with one exception: LAPIDARY INSCRIPTIONS CHISELLED INTO STONE. If you do not have a chisel in your hand, you must set off an appostive with commas, though at the beginning or end of the sentence only one comma is required.
As for commas, ancient Romans scarcely knew the period at the end of a sentence.
Not all phrases set off by commas are appositives. Some appositives are so brief— and sometimes so inevitable— that they are epithets: Alexander the Great, the Macedonian conqueror of Persia, comes to mind. But Charlemagne, "Charles the Great", has absorbed his epithet into his very name, much like his 9th-century contemporary Haroun al-Rashid, the caliph at Baghdad. Arabic personal names, daunting to the Anglophone eye,* if such metaphors may be mixed, combine a series of patronymics with an epithet or two, set "in apposition," a phrase not to confuse with "opposition.".
Review: this site has good examples, but its explanation isn't complete, and may be confusing. An appositive is a phrase or word that provides additional explanation next to the word it explains offset by commas. One way to identify an appositive is to ask the question: could this phrase replace the word next to it? Does this phrase make the word next to it unnecessary?
English language