Julia Augusti, or Julia Caesaris, was the only blood child of Octavian, later Augustus, the only child from his politically motivated marriage with Scribonia, his second wife ; Julia was born in 39 BC, step-sister and, later, second wife of Tiberius, maternal grandmother of Caligula and Agrippina the Younger, grandmother through marriage of Claudius, and maternal great-grandmother of Nero. Livia, then, was Julia’s stepmother, Antonia her husband’s (Tiberius’) stepsister. Julia’s birthday could not have been less auspicious: she was born the day on which Octavian divorced her mother to marry Livia Drusilla.
Initially, Julia may have lived with her mother if we assume that the reason why Scribonia engaged Scribonius Aphrodisius was to tutor her daughter. Scribonia was, nevertheless, soon relieved of her maternal duties and Julia went to live with her father and Livia 1. Here she would have enjoyed the company of Livia’s children from her first marriage to Tiberius Claudius Nero: Tiberius, three years older, and Drusus, about the same age. In keeping with Augustus’s attempts to resuscitate the familia and restore family values, both through example and later through legislation, the Leges Juliae, Julia received a strict upbringing and a formal education in the imperial household. The hope and intention, naively, was that Julia would grow up a paradigm of traditional wifely values, a good matrona in a society devoid of stuprum and adultery, where modesty, pietas and simple living were the order of the day.
To that end Julia’s curriculum included lanificium, working the wool – that ancient skill which Augustus saw as symbolic of the good old days when extravagance and adultery were unknown. The Emperor, as we have seen, promoted homespun by wearing it himself and letting the world believe that all the women of the imperial household were skilled in wool work – lanam faciunt . Macrobius adds that Julia loved literature and was cultured , not that surprising in the household of Augustus : Julia was then a docta puella.
Her childhood and early adolescence were over-protected, as was the upbringing of her own daughters – as paterfamilias Augustus took responsibility for their education too: like Julia, her daughters were taught to work the wool while her sons, Gaius, Lucius and Agrippa Postumus, received training in politics and military matters. Augustus himself helped to teach the boys how to swim and read and trained their handwriting style on his own. Suetonius records that Julia and her girls were forbidden to say anything that was not worthy of inclusion in the imperial day book; Julia’s visitors were vetted before being allowed access, friendships had to be approved; the Emperor even took the time to write personally to the respectable Lucius Vinicius, upbraiding him for having the temerity to call on Julia in Baiae without his permission. The children knew their place: they reclined beneath him on the lowest couch at dinner and rode in front of him or either side of him. As a portent of things to come, her father privately joked that he had two lovely daughters, filiae delicatae, to put up with: the Roman state, and Julia 2 .
Julia’s role as a pawn in her father’s games of political intrigue began early, at age two when she was part of a deal in 37 BC between Octavian’s friends, Gaius Maecenas, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa and Mark Antony 3: Julia was engaged to Antony’s ten-year-old son, Marcus Antonius Antyllus 4. As things turned out, circumstances dictated otherwise and the engagement was called off when Antony was defeated by her father at the battle of Actium. Julia was later betrothed to Cotiso, the King of the Getans (the Dacians), with whom Augustus was trying, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to forge an alliance against Mark Antony; according to Antony, Augustus was to marry Cotiso’s daughter but it all went wrong when Cotiso joined Antony 5. In 25 BC, aged fourteen, Julia married her cousin, seventeen year old Marcus Claudius Marcellus , rumoured to be Augustus’ successor 6. Augustus was preooccupied in Spain at the time of the wedding and deputed Agrippa to perform the usual paternal duties. Marcellus died two years later in Baiae in September 23 BC; Antonius Musa, the court physician who had recently cured Augustus, failed to save his potential heir. The marriage was without issue.
It is impossible to know for certain how far Julia was exposed to outside influences around this time. Presumably she would have attended the theatre, the games and other public events, just like any other girl, wife or widow of the elite classes. It is reasonable to assume that she was well aware of, maybe even attracted to, the poetry of the contemporary love elegists, Propertius, Tibullus, Sulpicia and others, and their patrons; she may even have attended the salons and soirees hosted by men like the successful general and even more successful socialite M. Valerius Messala Corvinus – patron of Tibullus and Ovid, and uncle of the elegiac poetess, Sulpicia. These two, along with Propertius and Horace and a number of others, inhabited and celebrated a world that was a very remote from the the Rome that conservatives such as Cato the Younger were anxious to preserve or, in the case of Julia’s own father, to restore through legislation or by apparent example. The sophisticated, urbane society of the poets turned traditional Rome, its mores and customs, on its head: the men in these smart coteries were ostensibly dominated by their women; the women were the dominae; the men subserviant; they allowed themselves to be enslaved in servitium amoris; their cursus honorum was militia amoris, their role in the domus and the familia knew no patria potestas: they languished locked-out and forlorn on the doorstep, exclusus amator. The ladies pursued by the poets were themselves independant, single-minded, vivacious, coquettish, manipulative, frustrating doctae puellae, free to peacock around Rome and Baiae as they pleased: we know them as Cynthia, Delia, Nemesis and Corinna, amongst others. How different then their lovers were from the ideal elite Roman male with his virtus, his power and domination over wife and children, and his res gestae; how different from the world of the matrona with her state of univira, her modesty and her docility. Add to this the notable achievement of Sulpicia in becoming a celebrated poet in her own right and there is a heady and exciting alternative lifestyle that is liberal and liberating, and intoxicatingly attractive to the youth of the day. It would not be surprising if Julia tasted some of this excitement and independance during her marriage to Marcellus, and in her widowhood, and that she warmed to the taste.
If Julia read or heard Propertius and the others, and indeed Catullus and Gallus and the other neoteroi of earlier days, then she would recognise this permissive, promiscuous lifestyle. If she needed to be reminded of how it was viewed by less liberal men then she would only have to read some of Horace’s poetry written around 23 BC. Horace himself celebrated good time girls as enthusiastically as any love poet and he was not averse to the pleasures of female company when it suited, particularly the dancing girls at the drinking parties he attended: Damalis is leered at remorselessly, Lyde is summoned to play her lyre and Neaera is required to sing – all as precursors to sex . The same poet, though, is at his most vituperative, and hypocritical, when he deplores the moral decay and turpitude of contemporary Rome, exacerbated by women and their louche behaviour: ‘the grown up girl [who] delights in being taught the Greek movements and is coached in seduction; all she thinks about now is illicit sex from top to toe’: today it’s dancing, tomorrow it will be adultery. Suetonius, however, blows the whistle on Horace when he tells us in his biography of the poet that he preferred sex at home to visiting brothels, inviting escorts back to his place where the mirrors in his bedroom literally reflected his sexual activity: coitus from every angle .
Octavian himself was no model of fidelity. Suetonius, incredibly, maintains that Augustus’ affairs were motivated not by lust but by subterfuge, using the women to expose the intrigues of their partners, his political opponents. Lust, though, was probably responsible for the occasion when, out to dinner, he led the wife of an ex-consul, possibly Livia, from the dining room to her bedroom, and later returned her to the party , her ears burning (rubentibus auriculis) and her hair all over the place. Antony adds a further four matronae seduced by Octavian in the first decade of his marriage to Livia, including Terentia or Terentilla, the wife of Horace’s patron, Maecenas. Antony asks Octavian why he is so exercised by his affair with Cleopatra when Octavian has probably slept with Tertullia, Terentilla, Rufilla, Salvia Titisenia and the rest of them. Suetonius tells us about Augustus’ Feast of the Divine Twelve – nothing less than an orgy of food and sex in which the guests came dressed as gods and goddesses. Sex apart, the feast was particularly scandalous because it took place during a time of serious food shortages in Rome. The satire of the day had it that the gods had eaten all the food in the city. Livia, according to Suetonius, was present . Augustus’ sexual voracity, apparently continued well into old age when he continued to deflower virgins, brought to him sometimes even by Livia. How much of this general promiscuity Julia witnessed and how much it influenced her own attitudes and actions it is impossible to tell.
Two years after the death of Marcellus in 21 BC Julia was dealt her next move in the political powerplay when she was married off to Agrippa, her father’s friend and ally: she was now eighteen, Agrippa was forty-three. Julia was a very convenient piece in the political marriage game: Augustus was out of Rome and needed a regent ; the old ally Agrippa was an obvious choice. He was made to divorce his wife, Claudia Marcella Maior, to clear the way to marry Julia. Marcella was one of two daughters (the Marcellae) of Octavia, Augustus’s sister. Marcella went on to marry Iullus Antonius, the second son of Mark Antony from his third wife Fulvia. Not only would the Julia match enhance Agrippa’s authority in Rome but it would provide Augustus with the all important line of succession; Julia, it could be argued, existed for this purpose in the eyes of Augustus. Earlier, Maecenas had warned Augustus that because he had champoined Agrippa so much he must either make him a son-in-law or kill him 7. Once again Augustus was unable to attend his daughter’s wedding: this time he was indisposed in Sicily. The five children the couple had between 20 and 12 BC satisfied, in theory at least, Augustus’s desire to establish his line of succession. One of the girls, Agrippina the Elder, later married Germanicus, son of Antonia and Drusus. In 17 BC Augustus adopted two of Julia’s sons, Gaius and Lucius; Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa Posthumus was belatedly adopted in AD 4.
We will never know how Julia reacted to this appropriation of her sons, clearly just two more pawns in her father’s dynastic games. Perhaps she accepted it, and his later personal control over their education. Perhaps it was a cause of resentment: from a purely maternal point of view she was effectively denied her instinctive role as mother; from a social standpoint she was sidelined from one of the matrona’s traditionally principle functions: overseeing her sons’ early education. Perhaps Julia’s only consolation is that on the celebrated Ara Pacis, completed in 9 BC, it is she who is depicted with her sons and not Augustus or Agrippa.
Agrippa, of course, continued with his military career which took him away from Rome, and Julia, for extended periods. The separations may have been punctuated by visits home or by an itinerant Julia, who, it seems, like Antonia, was not averse to travelling with her husband. She may have joined Agrippa in Gaul between 20 and 18 BC. In 17 BC she travelled with Agrippa through Greece and it seems likely that she gave birth to Agrippina at Mytilene on Lesbos. Once, when on her way to meet Agrippa in Ilium (Troy) she nearly drowned in a flash flood in the River Scamander; an angry Agrippa imposed a severe 100,000 drachmae fine on the locals, later withdrawn 8. In 16 BC, Agrippa and Julia visited Herod as part of an eastern tour; in 14 BC, they were in Athens.
But things started to go wrong when Julia began to assert her own individuality, reacting, no doubt to a greater or lesser extent, to the oppressed childhood she had endured, the increasingly liberal society around her and the sexual hypocrisy of her father and his legislation. We have already noted the reports, vulgo existimabatur, of Julia’s serial adultery with Sempronius Gracchus, described by Tacitus as pervicax adulter, persistent adulterer, and rumours of an unhealthy relationship with her stepbrother, Tiberius. Suetonius describes Julia’s, and her sister’s, behaviour as ‘all kinds of vice’ 9.
In 12 BC Agrippa died suddenly in Campania after an inconclusive winter campaign. Augustus moved quickly and, as soon as Julia, still in mourning, had given birth to Agrippa Postumus, betrothed Julia to Tiberius, his step-son 10. For Augustus, it was crucial that Julia remarry even though she was exempt from the legal obligation to do so by the ius trium liberorum; he was still obsessing about the succession, despite having adopted Gaius and Lucius, the children of Julia, now eight and five, as his sons. Political nonentities were an option for Julia : one such candidate was Gaius Proculeius, a friend of Augustus’ who is more celebrated for how he died than for his actual life: he committed suicide by ingesting gypsum in a bid to relieve what was probably ulcerative colitis; in Gaius’ day gypsum would have been used in the manufacture of plaster for sculpture.
Once Tiberius, to his everlasting regret and pain, non sine magno angore animi, had been compelled to divorce his current wife, the pregnant Vipsania Agrippina (Agrippa’s daughter from a previous marriage to Caecilia Attica, herself daughter of Cicero’s friend Atticus), he reluctantly married Julia, now approaching middle age, in 11 BC. Suetonius tells how Tiberius once saw Vipsania in the street and became so distraught that measures were taken to prevent a recurrence.
Suetonius records that despite a happy start to the marriage ‘living in harmony and with mutual affection’, primo concorditer et amore mutuo vixit, Tiberius soon came to loathe Julia; the feeling was mutual. She dutifully accompanied him to Illyria and, with Livia, celebrated his triumphant return to Rome; however, two events early on in the marriage had a significant impact – they could have brought the couple closer together, or, as happened, they could have had the opposite effect. First, their son died in infancy at Aquileia; then, in 9 BC, Drusus, Tiberius’s devoted brother, was tragically killed in a riding accident in Germany. Tiberius now condemned Julia’s behaviour, her mores, (possibly feeling guilty over their alleged incest); she considered him beneath her, ut imparem, and sent Augustus a letter delivered by Sempronius Gracchus, her lover, spelling this out. Julia was the first to invoke her descent from the divine blood of Augustus – she was not to be the last: both Agrippinas did likewise. Tacitus says that Gracchus persistently undermined Julia’s relationship with Tiberius and even composed the damning letter11. Ironically, Julia did not attend the dedication of the shrine of Marital Concord by Tiberius and Livia; Suetonius reports that they were now sleeping in separate beds. By 6 BC Tiberius had had enough of it all: when he took refuge in Rhodes as a private citizen having renounced all of his duties, the couple were separated by more than their beds.
The 5th century Saturnalia of Macrobius (2, 5; based on Domitius Marsus’ contemporary De Urbanitate) show us a thirty-eight year old Julia in Julia’s world: a world of putting on make-up ready to go out, tweezing grey hairs, of going to gladiator fights in the company of fashionable young men, of dressing provocatively. Macrobius illustrates this coquettish behaviour:
‘one day she stood before Augustus wearing a daring costume which upset her father although he kept quiet; the following day she came in dressed much more modestly, at which he expressed his delight that she was now dressed appropriately for a daughter of Augustus’.
Julia wittily responded by saying that today she dressed for her father, yesterday for her husband. Her modish dress sense was, of course, in direct contrast to the simple, modest homespun clothing Augustus was trying to promote to his subjects. In reply to those people who wondered why she did not conform to her father’s prudence and frugality she pointedly answered that “He forgets that he is Caesar but I never forget that I am Caesar’s daughter”’. Julia was very much her own woman. When asked how her children all resembled Agrippa despite her wayward behaviour, she is alleged to have quipped that being pregnant allowed her to pursue her extra-maritial affairs without fear of getting pregnant: ‘I never take on a passenger unless the ship is full’. Unfortunately for Julia, a somewhat less accomodating ship was to take her into insular exile on Pandateria.
Augustus, fearing that a re-marriage might bring pretenders to his throne, prohibited his daughter from divorcing Tiberius: Julia must remain a vidua. She made the most of her new found freedom and independence; whether she adopted the promiscuous social life of the independent doctae puellae we cannot know but it seems barely credible that she would withdraw from that exciting, risque world, married or not. What happened next would suggest that she did enjoy a life of decadence: again, we have little detail but in 2 BC Augustus denounced Julia and her behaviour to the Senate; he had her arrested for adultery and treason and annulled her marriage . To a sensationalist Velleius Paterculus, a storm erupted in Augustus’s’ domus, foeda dictu memoroque horrenda: ‘disgusting to describe, repellent to remember’. Augustus had found out about his daughter’s all too public fornication:
Iulia..nihil quid facere aut pati turpiter posset femina, luxuria libidineque infectum reliquit magnitudinemque fortunae suae peccandi licentia metiebatur, quicquid liberet quo licito vindicans.
‘Julia…scandalously left nothing lustful or lavish undone that a woman could when prostituting herself, and quantified her good fortune by her dissolute sin, claiming she could rightfully do whatever she liked’.
According to Seneca, whose vocubulary and imagery is even more immoderate, Julia’s sins were for Augustus ulcera, ‘sores’; which when excised, felt as if he was cutting off his own limbs, limbs which, Tityos- like, kept growing back. Julia’s nocturnal adventures even took in prostitution and, ironically, sex on the statue of Marysas in the Forum – a symbol of hubris and indicium libertatis, a symbol of liberty and freedom of speech. More galling for Augustus must have been the report that Julia regularly fornicated on the very rostra on which he had delivered his moral legislation, which, among other things, criminalised adultery with a sentence of insular exile. We learn from Pliny the Elder that Tiberius claimed that she had also plotted to kill him: adulterium filiae et consilium parricidae palam facta 12. If this is true then it suggests a level of political ambition and power-seeking hitherto unnoticed, and an example of the contempt in which she now held her father.
Her lovers paid the price: Sempronius Gracchus was exiled to Cercina and, after fourteen years, was murdered, while Iullus Antonius, son of Mark Antony and Fulvia, was forced into suicide. Other sexual partners, according to Velleius Paterculus, included T. Quinctius Crispinus, Appius Claudius Pulcher, and Cornelius Scipio. Tiberius was delighted at the news of Julia’s arrest, believing that she deserved everything she got for her adulterous behaviour: however, he magnaminously urged Augustus to reconcile his daughter and allowed her to keep all the gifts he had given her. 13.
Julia’s sentence was harsh. Augustus exiled his daughter to the tiny island of Pandateria, all of two miles long, in the Tyrrhenian Sea off Gaeta, (modern Ventotene), devoid of men and alcohol free; visitors were only allowed with Augustus’s permission, and then only after a full physical description, including distinguishing features such as scars and moles, had been given. The alcohol ban was presumably due to her father’s belief that drink was partly to blame for her promiscuity. Julia’s only consolation was that Scribonia, her mother, went with her to the island; a true matrona, looking after her daughter come what may. Back in Rome, whenever Julia came up in conversation Augustus would quote from Homer’s Iliad: ‘I wish I didn’t have a wife and that I died childless’. Henceforth he referred to Julia as one of his three boils or suppurating sores. The situation cannot have been helped by Ovid’s eulogistic poem in which he, with remarkable bad-timing, celebrates Augustus’s achievements in ordering women to be faithful and driving out sin: hic castas duce iubet esse castas..repulit ille nefas14. Ovid’s unsettling praise may even have contributed to his own exile by Augustus in AD 8.
Suetonius suggests that when he heard about Julia’s conduct Augustus was even more mortified than he was over the deaths of Gaius and Lucius, his beloved grandsons. H e shut himself off from the world for a while; the indictment of his daughter was read to the Senate in his absence; execution was considered and rejected. One of Julia’s freedwomen, Phoebe, who was implicated in Julia’s infelicities, hanged herself, prompting Augustus to exclaim that he wished he was Phoebe’s father 15.
Some four hundred years later Macrobius, working from the contemporary Domitius Marsus’ book of famous sayings, tells us that Julia was popular with the people on account of her kind, gentle and forgiving nature: it came as a surprisedthat at the same time she could be so debauched , with all those vitia. Tacitus reports that the public called for her return: Augustus flew into a rage, wishing on them fornicating daughters and adulterous wives if they ever raised the matter again. Augustus was adamant and implacable: anxious to save face and not to appear hypocritical in the face of his campaign and legislation for moral regeneration.
Little is known about Julia’s elder daughter, Julia the Younger or Vipsana Julia Agrippina, born around 19 BC. Her life story is tragically reminiscent of her mother’s, she too would lose control of her daughters’ upbringing as she did her sons’. In 6 BC, Augustus fixed it for her to marry Lucius Aemilius Paullus, a senator and grandson of Scribonia, her grandmother. Their marital home was large and conspicuous: anathema to Augustus, so he had it demolished. In AD 7 or 8, suspiciously close to the time that Paullus was condemned for treason, Vipsana was found guilty of adultery with D. Iunius Silanus and banished from Rome to Campania; further alleged stuprum resulted in exile to the island of Trimerus in the Adriatic Sea. There is virtually no record of any of this permissiveness other than Pliny’s bizarre report that she boasted of owning the smallest male dwarf in Rome. The only punishment Silanus received was the ending of his friendship with Augustus, according to Tacitus. Vipsana was also linked with Ovid: he was exiled in Tomis around the same time that she landed on Trimerus. Was she implicated in the error that Ovid claims , along with an injudicious carmen, which was responsible for his banishment ?
Julia the Younger may not have been totally without male company on her island, though, if Suetonius’s story 16 that she gave birth to a child there is to be believed; Augustus, exercising his rights as paterfamilias and ius patrium, ius vitae necisque had the baby exposed. After twenty years of exile Julia the Younger died on Trimerus in AD 28. During this time she was apparently supported financially by a duplicitous Livia – according to Tacitus, ever happy to compromise her stepchildren and grandchildren per occultum, surreptitiously, when they remained a threat, then publicly, palam, help them when that threat was extinguished. We shall meet Julia the Younger’s younger sister, Agrippina the Elder later.
Her mother, Julia Augusti, missed her wine; she allegedly complained : ‘My time here is dreadful, no wine to ease my stress and no lower class people for me to ridicule’. The absence of wine must have been made more unbearable given the existence of a small vineyard on the island. After five years Augustus relented and permitted Julia Augusti to return to the mainland, committing her to remain, under surveillance, in the dreary town of Rhegium (Reggio di Calabria); she was allowed an allowance by her father (peculium) but was disinherited and denied the honour of being buried in his Mausoleum on her death. When Tiberius acceded , he stopped Julia’s perculium and ordered that she be confined to one room in her house in – virtual house arrest. Tiberius later withdrew all support and allowed her to die a slow death from starvation in 15 AD, depressed and devoid of all hope after the murder of Agrippa Postumus on Planasia. Julia and Agrippa Postumus had represented a threat to Tiberius, as did Sempronius Gracchus: all three were duly murdered but Julia got revenge of a sort when her grandson, Caligula, murdered Tiberius on Capri.
The inevitable effect of what is a virtual damnatio memoriae on the exact details of her crime is that Julia tends to be remembered only for her dissolute behaviour; hardly surprising since most of the memories are from male, elite men following a tradition of inventing or highlighting the more prurient corners of the lives of powerful, talented or influential women. Sallust’s Sulpicia, Clodia, Fulvia and Cleopatra all suffer the same fate at the hands of a flock of historians with varying degrees of evidence or justification. Velleius Paterculus describes Julia as ‘stained by sex or excess’, adding a list of her lovers 17 . Seneca says she had ‘adulterers by the herd’ : admissos gregatim adulteros; Pliny the Elder calls her an ‘exemplum licentiae’, the epitome of licentiousness with her night time frolics on the statue of Marsyas which groans under the weight of her luxuria, her lewdness. Dio Cassius records ‘night time orgies and drinking parties in the Forum, even on the Rostra’ . Seneca reminds us that the Rostra was the very place where Augustus had delivered his moral legislation, restoring family values and outlawing adultery, the Leges Juliae; Julia had chosen to prostitute herself there 18. Marsyas was, amongst other things a lawyer, causidicus, who competed with Apollo in his role as a jurist, the inspiration for Augustus’ legislation and reforms: the desecration of this statue by Julia, crowning it with a chaplet to signify superiority over Apollo, would have been deeply insulting to Augustus who would have seen it as a desecration of his programme of reform. Expunging her memory, , was sufficiently effective that only two busts of Julia, Augustus’ only daughter, indeed only natural child, remain.
Promiscuous Julia undoubtedly was, but it is as well to remember that she was also remembered in the words of Macrobius as a decent, kind and gentle woman: mitis humanitas minimeque saevus animus. Her influence was largely indirect, a pawn in her father’s selfish, manipulative political intrigues. Her helplessness and feelings of exploitation probably ignited in her a need for retaliation: she exerted a spirited, albeit shameful, independence of mind that had the unfortunate effect in turn of reducing the emperor of Rome, her father, to frustrated vindictivenes and, thereby, inciting the invective of generations of historians. Her defiance exposed her father’s hypocrisy and the double standards of a society where men could commit adultery with impunity, where wives were expected to be tolerant and where adulteresses were criminalised and vilified 19.
- Dio Cassius, 48, 34, 3. For Scribonia, see Fantham, Julia Augusti 17-19.
- See above p. xxx. Suetonius, Augustus 64; Macrobius, Saturnalia, 2, 5, 1-10.
- For more, see Chrystal, Women in Ancient Rome.
- Mark Antony made Antyllus (the Archer) his official heir; Octavian had him executed in 30 BC when he was seventeen.
- Suetonius, cit. 63. Dio discredits the Dacian connection.
- Dio 53, 30; Velleius Paterculus 2, 93.
- Octavian’s affairs: Suetonius, Augustus 62, 63, 69: Tacitus, Annals 1, 10, 5. Marriage to Agrippa: Dio, 54, 6.
- Nicolaus of Damascus, Fragmenta der Griechischein Historiker 2 A: 421-2; Josephus, Antiquities 16, 2, 2.
- Suetonius, Tiberius 7; Augustus, 65. See above p. xxx.
- Dio 54, 31.
- Suetonius, Tiberius 7, 3; Tacitus, cit. 1, 53.
- Seneca, De Brevitate Vitae 4, 6; idem, De Beneficiis32. Pliny NH 21, 8-9.
- Suetonius, cit. 11. Velleius Paterculus 2, 100.
- Dio Cassius 55.10, Suetonius, Augustus 65; Ovid, Fasti 2, 127-32.
- Pliny NH 7, 149; Suetonius, cit.
- Suetonius, op. cit, 64-5
- Velleius Paterculus, cit.
- Seneca, cit. ; Pliny, op. cit.
- We must beware, as ever, of over-estimating the frequency of adultery just because we hear about it more than monogamous marriages, the norm. See Aulus Gellius, 11, 10, 23.
© 2015 Paul Chrystal