Julia (daughter of Caesar)

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Julia (wife of Pompey)
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Julia
Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum. The inscription reads: "Julia; Gaius Caesar's daughter; Pompey's wife."
Bornc. 76 BC
DiedAugust 54 BC (aged c. 22)
SpousePompey (m. 59 BC)
PartnerServilius Caepio
ChildrenOne (died at a few days old)
Parents (mother)

Julia (c. 76 BC – August 54 BC) was the daughter of

Pompey the Great
and was renowned for her beauty and virtue.

Life

Julia may have been born around 76 BC.

optimates (the oligarchal party in Rome), especially by Marcus Tullius Cicero and Cato the Younger.[5][6][7]

Pompey was supposedly infatuated with his bride. The personal charms of Julia were remarkable: she was a kind woman of beauty and virtue; and although policy prompted her union, and she was thirty years younger than her husband, she possessed in Pompey a devoted husband, to whom she was, in return, reportedly attached.

Roman grain supply as curator annonae, exercising his command through subordinates.[9]

Julia died before a breach between her husband and father had become inevitable.[9][10] Plutarch reports that at the election of aediles in 55 BC, Pompey was surrounded by a tumultuous mob, and his robe was stained with the blood of some of the rioters. A slave carried the stained toga to his house and was seen by Julia. Imagining that her husband was slain, she fell into premature labor,[9][11] miscarrying thereafter. As a result of the miscarriage, her health was irreparably damaged. In August of the next year, 54 BC, she died in childbirth,[12] and her infant—a son, according to some writers,[13][14][15] a daughter, according to others,[9][16]—did not survive and died along with Julia.[9][17]

Caesar was in Britain, according to Seneca,[18] when he received the news of Julia's death.[19]

Pompey wished her ashes to repose in his favourite

Forum
.

After Julia's death, Pompey and Caesar's alliance began to fade, which resulted in

Julians.[27]

Cultural depictions

In the Pharsalia by the Roman poet Lucan, the ghost of Julia appears to Pompey, blaming his re-marriage to Cornelia Metella for the outbreak of civil war.[28][29] The Italian Renaissance poet Carlo Marsuppini wrote a eulogy about Piccarda Bueri, in which he compared her to Julia. He names her as an example of great marital devotion.[30]

In

The Divine Comedy (14th century), Julia was encountered by Dante in the first circle of Hell, the Limbo (where souls rest who are not in torture, pagans that lived righteous existences):[31]

[...] The foremost circle that surrounds the abyss. [...]
[...] I knew, who in that Limbo were suspended. [...]
[...] Lucretia, Julia, Marcia, and Cornelia, [...]

References

  1. ^ Tacitus, Annals, iii. 6.
  2. ^ Guy Edward Farquhar Chilver , Robin J. Seager " Iulia (2)" The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Ed. Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth. Oxford University Press 2009. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t111.e3368.
  3. ^ Matthias Gelzer, Caesar, Politician and Statesman, (translated by Peter Needham), Oxford, 1968; Thomas Robert Shannon Broughton, Magistrates of the Roman Republic, vol. 2, 132, New York, (1951–1986). Gelzer quotes Broughton to assert that Caesar was quaestor in 69. Gelzer then explains that Caesar, after taking on his place of duty, delivered an oration in praise of his aunt Julia. Shortly after this, his wife died too.
  4. ^ Sempronius [I 15]. In: Der Neue Pauly. Vol. 11, col. 465.
  5. ^ Cicero, Letters to Atticus, ii. 17, viii. 3.
  6. ^ Plutarch, Life of Caesar, 14; Pompey, 48; Cato the Younger, 31.
  7. Life of Julius Caesar
    , 50.
  8. ^ Plutarch, Life of Pompey, 48.
  9. ^ a b c d e Plutarch, Life of Pompey, 53.
  10. Velleius Paterculus
    , ii. 44, 47.
  11. ^ Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings, iv. 6. § 4.
  12. ^ William Smith (ed.), A New Classical Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, Mythology and Geography, 1851.
  13. ^ Velleius Paterculus, ii. 47.
  14. ^ a b Suetonius, Life of Julius Caesar, 26.
  15. ^ Lucanus, v. 474, ix. 1049.
  16. ^ Dio Cassius, xxxix. 64.
  17. ^ Billows, Richard A. (2008). Julius Caesar: The Colossus of Rome. Abingdon: Routledge. p. 179.
  18. To Marcia, On consolation
    , xiv. 3.
  19. ^ Cicero, Oration for Publius Quinctius, iii. 1; Letters to Atticus, iv. 17.
  20. ^ In Latin: laudatio funebris.
  21. ^ Dio Cassius, xxxix. 64; xlviii. 53.
  22. ^ Suetonius, Life of Julius Caesar, 84.
  23. Ab Urbe condita
    preserved by a 4th century summary entitled Periochae, cxvi. 6.
  24. Life of Augustus
    , 95; compare Life of Julius Caesar , 84.
  25. ^ Dio Cassius, xliii. 22.
  26. ^ John T. Ramsey, A. Lewis Licht, Comet of 44 B.C. and Caesar's Funeral Games, appendix III, Oxford University Press US, 1997.
  27. ^ Octavian followed this precedent in 44 BC by staging the ludi funebres for Caesar while simultaneously moving the Ludi Veneris Genetricis from September to July, after which time they were known as Ludi Victoriae Caesaris; see John T. Ramsey and A. Lewis Licht, The Comet of 44 B.C. and Caesar's Funeral Games (American Philological Association, 1997), p. 41 online.
  28. ^ Lucan Pharsalia 3.31–3
  29. ^ Haley 1985, p. 56.
  30. ^ Pernis & Adams 2006, p. 9.
  31. The Divine Comedy, Inferno Canto IV, 24, 45 and 128, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
    , Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867.

Primary sources

Secondary sources