Roman imperial dynasties
There were only two families who managed to maintain supreme command over Rome for a century, thus also ensuring long periods of stability and wealth, the Julio-Claudia family and the Arria-Annia family (improperly remembered as Antoninian) and both linked from an identical connotation: the dynastic descent in the female line.
The interpretation seems at least curious if one considers that in Roman society the hereditary line was only male and to maintain, even if only formally, this male precedence resorted to the institution of adoption. But these were tools that could only apply to continue to compete in the patrician class and that did not count for the people who loved the imperial families especially if there were many matronae with children.
The gens Julia prevailed in the Roman aristocracy in the second century B.C. although the first representative of which we have news is Caius Julius, elected among the Decemvirs in 447 B.C. with the task of writing the Tabulae XII leges; Julius Caesar then, to legitimize his aspiration to power, claimed his descent from Aeneas and therefore divine descent from Venus. To refer to an "earthly" ancestry, Livy will then dust off an ancestor, Julio Proculus, who friend and companion of Romulus had the vision in which the disappeared king informed him of the call of the gods and of his new divine nature as Quirinus.
The empire of Rome was established by Octavian but the real founder is Julius Caesar who appointed a pro-nephew, or his sister's nephew, as successor. Although it is possible to think of a female bond still antecedent. Before Caesar and Augustus "found" their divine ancestors, the gens Julia, although belonging to the Roman patriciate, was not rich, and Gaius Julius Caesar, senator and praetor, managed to improve his social position when he married Aurelia Cotta of the powerful and rich gens Aurelia with whom he had two daughters and a son. The daughters were respectively Julia Maior wife of Gaius Marius and Julia Minor, wife of Sulla; and his son Julio Cesar had in wife Cornelia daughter of Lucius Cornelius Cinna, powerful supporter of Marius.
The approach to power by Julius Caesar thus passed through the parental ties that his family, through marriages, tightened with the two men who fought over control over Rome for about 30 years. But if his aunts protected him during his cursus honorum, Caesar knew he could count on another very powerful woman, his mother Aurelia Cotta who managed to transform Sulla's death sentence, when Caesar disobeyed him by not divorcing Cinnilla , in the distancing that brought him to the East. The political career and the conquest of power are to be ascribed exclusively to Caesar's skills, just as Octavian's unpredictable rise will be the result of his political ability.
The legitimacy of power still at the end of the republic was strictly connected to ancestry and it does not matter whether male or female and it is perhaps the phrase that Julius Caesar pronounced at the funeral of his aunt Julia, widow of Gaius Marius, which clarifies the principle that counted for families who competed for pawer over Rome during the passage from the Republic to the Empire:
The family of my aunt Julia descends from the maternal side by kings and paternal by the immortal gods.
The Julio-Claudian dynasty had its emperors for the blood ties that existed in the female line:
- Octavian son of Actia minor, nephew of Julius Caesar because daughter of his sister Julia Mayor;
- Tiberius because son of Livia Drusilla, wife of Octavian and adopted by him in the gens Julia;
- Gaius, better known as "Caligula", son of Agrippina the Elder, daughter of Julia, daughter of Octavian (and Germanicus son of Antonia the Younger and Drusus the son of Livia Drusilla);
- Claudius son of Antonia the Younger (daughter of Octavia Minor, sister of Octavian) and Drusus the son of Livia Drusilla wife and later adoptive daughter of Octavian;
Nero son of Agrippina the younger, (daughter of Agrippina Mayor and Germanicus and grandson of Julia Augusti filae).
After Nero's death and the year of the four emperors, the Flavia dynasty began with Vespasian and historians believe that if the army had supported Vespasian as it recognized the emperor in him, the Senate had evaluated, among other things, that his descent given by two sons could give Rome a long period of government without risk of power struggles. Instead, the Flavian dynasty, formed only by the father and two sons, was a brief interlude; Titus and Domitian had no children, except for Flavia Domitilla who died from an abortion obtained according to the wishes of her uncle and lover the emperor Domitian. Moreover, the Flavia dynasty never aroused in the people of Rome the feeling of loyalty that had characterized its link with the Julio-claudia gens. However the people of Rome loved the dynasties and had to have their weight the blood bond that united the gens Flavia to the family of that Quintus Marcius Barea Soranus whose brother had two daughters, one who was the wife of Emperor Titus and the another, Marcia, the mother of Emperor Trajan.
In January 98 Trajan became emperor, he succeeded Nerva who had adopted him and the senate welcomed the new emperor who would bring one of his best times to Rome ...
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by M.L. ©ALL RIGHTS RESERVED (Ed 1.0 - 16/04/2020)