The Julii of Rome: Octavian’s House and the Name of Caesar
Part of the claimants thread. Gaius Octavius — the man the Senate named Augustus — had one biological child, ever — a daughter. This memo follows his blood to its end: exiles, prisons, poison, matricide, men killed for their descent, and the last of the line dying quietly around AD 79, eleven years after the dynasty fell.
Reading note. This memo is reference material for The Name After the Blood, 44 BC – AD 90 period timeline — its blood lane carries these endings. It continues The Julii (the endings of the gens) and pairs with The Julii of Judaea (the enfranchised house, which kept the male line the imperial house lacked). This memo is built to the same format as The Julii of Judaea — the two houses are meant to be read side by side: the one that held the name in an unbroken male line, and the one that held the blood and destroyed it. The full audit of every source is in the master source register.
1. The numbers
- Biological children of Augustus: one. Julia, born 39 BC to Scribonia — on the day, Suetonius notes, of his divorce.
- Julia: exiled by her father in 2 BC; died in confinement AD 14, the year her father died.
- Grandsons: Gaius Caesar †AD 4; Lucius Caesar †AD 2; Agrippa Postumus, executed under guard within days of Augustus’s death, AD 14.
- Granddaughters’ lines: Julia the Younger exiled, †AD 28; Agrippina the Elder starved in exile AD 33, her sons Nero Caesar (†31) and Drusus Caesar (†33) died in prison; Caligula assassinated AD 41 with his infant daughter; Agrippina the Younger killed AD 59 on the order of her son Nero.
- Nero’s one child, Claudia Augusta, died in infancy AD 63. With Nero’s death in AD 68 the blood left the throne.
- The Junii Silani, great-great-grandsons of Augustus: Marcus poisoned AD 54 — recorded by Tacitus as the first death of Nero’s reign, for his descent; Decimus †64; Lucius †65.
- The last: their sister Junia Calvina, died c. AD 79. The dating is standard-reference and flagged in the verification register.
2. The proscriptions of 43 BC
This chapter stands at the head of the memo because the rest of the family record cannot be read without it, and because of an asymmetry that runs through this pair of memos. Its companion, The Julii of Judaea, examines a portrait of a tyrant descending through one filtered channel whose partiality its own transmitter confesses in writing. What follows descends through eight witnesses across three centuries, hostile and friendly, Greek and Roman — and is omitted from the only account the accused wrote himself.
2.1 The instrument
On 26 November 43 BC the lex Titia made the alliance of Octavian, Antony and Lepidus a legally constituted office: triumviri rei publicae constituendae, three men for the reconstituting of the state, for five years. Their powers exceeded any magistracy the Republic had created. They could legislate without reference to the Senate, appoint magistrates years in advance, and execute Roman citizens without trial and without appeal.
That is the fact to hold through everything below. What followed was not a riot, a coup, or a massacre in the field. It was carried out under a statute the three of them had caused to be passed, by an office the Roman people had voted into existence.
2.2 The mechanism
Lists of names — tabulae proscriptionis — were posted publicly. A name on the list lost the protection of law and forfeited its property, and carried a price: on the figures preserved, 2,500 drachmae for the head of a free man, and a thousand plus his freedom for a slave who brought his master’s. Informers were paid the same. Anyone sheltering a proscribed man risked joining the list.
The property was auctioned and the proceeds paid the legions then preparing to march east against Brutus and Cassius. Historians who accept the fiscal explanation — that the triumvirs were short of money and needed rich men’s estates — tend toward the higher casualty figures, because on that reading the killing was not a means to political security but a means to cash.
2.3 The numbers, and the disagreement
The sources do not agree, and this memo states the range rather than taking the largest. Appian gives about three hundred senators and two thousand equites — but that figure covers everyone killed or dispossessed between 43 and the treaty of Misenum in 39, not the formally proscribed alone. Livy gives 130 senators and many equites besides; Florus 140; Plutarch 200, “a little over 200”, and 300 across three different Lives. Appian elsewhere describes seventeen names posted first, then 130 and 150 added in two further rounds.
Hinard, reviewing the whole evidence in 1985, concluded there were about three hundred proscribed in total, split roughly evenly between senators and knights. Beneath every estimate there is a floor that is not an estimate: about a hundred and sixty of the victims are known by name today.
| Source | Position | What it carries | Its figure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Appian Civil Wars 4 | Greek, mid-2nd c. AD, from lost sources incl. Asinius Pollio | The fullest surviving account: the lists, the rewards, the trade of relatives, the individual deaths | ~300 senators, ~2,000 equites — covering all killed or dispossessed 43–39 BC |
| Suetonius Augustus 27 | Roman, c. AD 110, imperial secretary with archive access | That Octavian opposed the proscription, then prosecuted it more harshly than either colleague | — |
| Livy via the Periochae | Roman, contemporary of Augustus, writing under him | The epitome survives where the books do not | 130 senators, and many equites |
| Florus | Roman, 2nd c. AD | Epitome of the Livian tradition | 140 senators |
| Plutarch Brutus, Cicero, Antony | Greek, c. AD 100 | The death of Cicero; the bargaining among the three | 200 · “a little over 200” · 300, in three different Lives |
| Cassius Dio | Greek, early 3rd c. AD | Perusia; the conduct of the triumvirs | — |
| Velleius Paterculus | Roman, under Tiberius — friendly to the regime | Works to shift blame to Antony and Lepidus — itself evidence the charge was live | — |
| Res Gestae Divi Augusti | Augustus’s own account of his life, inscribed on bronze | Does not mention the proscriptions at all. Claims instead that when victorious he spared all citizens who sought pardon | — |
2.4 The trade
The detail on which the sources agree, and the one that says most about the men doing it: each of the three gave up someone of his own to obtain someone he wanted.
- Antony surrendered his uncle, Lucius Julius Caesar.
- Lepidus surrendered his brother, Lucius Aemilius Paullus.
- Octavian surrendered Cicero — who had championed him in the Senate against Antony months earlier, and whose speeches had carried him into public life.
Antony’s uncle and Lepidus’s brother both survived, stripped of their property. Lucius Caesar survived because his sister Julia — Antony’s own mother — stood in the doorway of her house and would not let the soldiers past. Cicero did not survive. He was taken on 7 December 43 BC on the road from his estate to a waiting ship; by the account he leaned his head from the litter and told the soldier to strike. He was beheaded, his hands were cut off, and the head and the hands were nailed to the Rostra — the platform from which he had delivered the speeches against Antony. His brother Quintus was killed with his son.
2.5 What the sources say about Octavian in particular
This is the part of the record that matters most for a memo about his house, and it is better stated than characterised. Suetonius — not hostile in the way Tacitus is, and a man with archive access — makes four statements at Augustus 27:
- That Octavian opposed the proscription at first, and tried for some time to prevent it.
- That once begun, he carried it through with greater severity than either of his colleagues.
- That while the other two could often be moved by personal influence and entreaty, he alone insisted that no one be spared.
- That he added to the list Gaius Toranius, his own guardian — the man who had been his father’s colleague in the aedileship.
Suetonius preserves one further exchange, from Julius Saturninus. When the proscription was over, Lepidus addressed the Senate in justification of what had been done and held out hope of leniency in future, on the ground that enough punishment had been inflicted. Octavian answered that he had agreed to end the proscription only on condition that he was left a free hand for the future.
To that the tradition adds Perusia, 40 BC. Suetonius and Dio report that after the siege three hundred senators and knights were sacrificed at an altar raised to the deified Julius, on the Ides of March; a substantial body of scholarship treats the charge as Antonian propaganda from the years the two men were rivals, and the memo records it as contested. The reply attributed to him there is not contested in the same way, and it is two words: to those who begged for mercy, moriendum esse — you must die.
2.6 What he wrote about it himself
Here the memo can do something for Octavian that it cannot do for Herod, and it is the reason this chapter exists. Augustus wrote his own account of his life. The Res Gestae Divi Augusti was inscribed on bronze columns at his Mausoleum and copied on stone across the empire; it is the fullest first-person political document to survive from antiquity.
It does not mention the proscriptions. Not the lists, not the prices, not Cicero, not Toranius, not the number of the dead. It opens instead with a nineteen-year-old raising an army at his own expense to restore liberty to a republic oppressed by a faction. And where the subject cannot be avoided altogether it makes a claim the rest of the record contradicts outright: that when victorious he spared all citizens who sought pardon.
Set that beside Suetonius’s sentence — that he alone insisted no one be spared — and the two cannot both be true. The companion memo argues that the record on Herod was shaped by men with motives and that the shaping is now beyond recovery. Here the shaping is recoverable, because the man did it himself, in public, on bronze, and the sources he could not suppress survive alongside it.
2.7 Who was responsible
The memo states this carefully, because overstating it is the easiest way to lose the argument. Three men held the office, not one. In November 43 BC Octavian was twenty years old and the junior partner: Antony was the consul, the experienced commander and the dominant figure, and Antony is generally held most responsible for the pursuit of Cicero in particular. It would not be accurate to say Octavian ran the proscriptions.
What the record says is narrower, better attested, and worse. That the youngest of the three, who had argued against it, prosecuted it more harshly than either of the others once it began. That he alone refused to spare anyone. That he proscribed his own guardian. That when the senior partner proposed leniency, he answered by reserving a free hand. That he alone of the three survived to profit from every confiscation. And that when he came to write the record of his own life, he left the episode out and claimed the opposite.
Nothing in the forty-five years that followed — the roads, the peace, the marble, the title — alters any of those statements. This memo does not treat the later name as an answer to the earlier record, and notes that the man himself evidently understood it was not one, or he would not have needed to omit it.
2.8 Why this stands at the head of a family memo
Because the instrument recurs. What begins here as a public list with a price on each name becomes, through the sections that follow, a private list without one — the same house killing its own by prison, starvation, forced suicide and imperial order, for a hundred and twenty years, until there is no one left to kill. The proscriptions are where the method is established; section 10 sets out where it led.
3. One daughter
The fact that shapes the whole century is stated first. Augustus held supreme power for over forty years, married three times, and fathered one child: a daughter. There was never a son. The man who received the Julian name by adoption because the male line had failed produced no male line of his own — and so “the blood of Augustus,” from its very first link, could only travel the way his own Julian blood had come to him: through a woman.
Everything in this memo descends from Julia. Her father used her marriages as instruments of succession — to his nephew Marcellus, to his general Agrippa, to his stepson Tiberius — and in 2 BC exiled her for adultery under his own morality laws, to an island where she was forbidden wine and male company. He never recalled her. She died in the year of his death, and the tradition records that Tiberius, her third husband, tightened her confinement to the point of death by deprivation.
4. The grandsons
Julia’s marriage to Agrippa produced five children, and for a decade the succession looked secured in blood. Augustus adopted the two eldest boys as his own sons — Gaius and Lucius Caesar, paraded as principes iuventutis, princes of the youth. Lucius died at Massilia in AD 2, aged eighteen; Gaius, wounded in Armenia, died in AD 4, aged twenty-three. Two natural deaths, if the tradition’s suspicions of Livia are set aside as the unproven claims they are — and the register keeps them as claims.
The third grandson, Agrippa Postumus, was adopted in AD 4 alongside Tiberius, then disgraced, disinherited and confined to an island under guard. Within days of Augustus’s death in AD 14 he was killed by his guard. Tacitus opens the Annals with it: the first crime of the new principate. Whoever gave the order — the sources leave it disputed between Tiberius, Livia and a standing instruction of Augustus himself — the accession of the first adopted successor began with the killing of the founder’s last grandson.
The pattern of section 10 of The Julii of Judaea repeats here at one remove: the impostor Clemens, who shook Italy in AD 16, was impersonating precisely this man — the murdered grandson of Augustus. The first false claimant of the imperial age claimed the blood, not the name.
5. The granddaughters’ lines
With the grandsons dead, the blood ran on through Julia’s two daughters — and the house consumed it, generation by generation, in the ways the numbers above list. Julia the Younger: exiled like her mother in AD 8, her infant born in exile exposed on Augustus’s own order; she died in AD 28 after twenty years’ confinement. Agrippina the Elder: the most direct carrier of the blood after her brothers’ deaths, widow of Germanicus, arrested by Tiberius, a soldier’s blow taking her eye, starved to death in exile in AD 33 — with her eldest sons Nero Caesar and Drusus Caesar already died in prison, the second reduced, Suetonius records, to chewing the stuffing of his mattress.
Two of her children reached the throne’s orbit and died violently there: Caligula, emperor at twenty-four, assassinated at twenty-eight with his wife and his infant daughter Julia Drusilla — her skull dashed against a wall in the same hour; and Agrippina the Younger, mother of Nero, whose death belongs to the next section. Her remaining daughter Julia Livilla was executed under Claudius. Of the nine children of Germanicus and Agrippina, not one died of age in freedom.
6. The blood against the blood
AD 59 is the hinge of the memo. Nero — great-great-grandson of Augustus through his mother — ordered the death of that mother, Agrippina the Younger — great-granddaughter of Augustus. After the collapsing boat failed, the assassins finished it in her villa; Tacitus preserves the tradition of her last instruction to the swordsman: strike the womb. The matricide is, in the terms of this memo, the blood of Augustus destroying the blood of Augustus — the founder’s line had reached the point of consuming itself at one generation’s distance.
Nero’s one child, Claudia Augusta, born to Poppaea in AD 63, was deified at four months old — and died before she was one. When Nero cut his own throat in AD 68, the blood of Augustus left the throne it had held, through women, for ninety-five years. It had not left the world.
7. The Silani: killed for the descent
The collateral line ran from the exiled Julia the Younger: her daughter Aemilia Lepida married into the Junii Silani, making that family’s children great-great-grandsons of Augustus — abnepotes Augusti, and the sources use exactly that term. Under Nero the descent itself became the charge.
Tacitus opens his account of the reign with it: the first death of the new principate, AD 54, was Marcus Junius Silanus, proconsul of Asia, poisoned at dinner — a man so inert he was called “the golden sheep,” killed, Tacitus states, because he was a great-great-grandson of Augustus and stood a generation closer to the founder than the new emperor did. His brother Decimus Silanus Torquatus was driven to open his veins in AD 64, charged with, among other things, boasting of his descent from Augustus. The nephew Lucius Silanus Torquatus was killed in AD 65 in the purge after the Pisonian conspiracy. Three men of one family, who died in eleven years, their bloodline recorded in each case as the substance of the offence. Under the last emperor of the “Julian” dynasty, carrying the blood of its founder was a capital condition.
8. The last: Junia Calvina
One of that family outlived the dynasty: Junia Calvina, sister of the Silani — great-great-granddaughter of Augustus, exiled under Claudius, recalled by Nero after her sister-accuser’s fall, and still alive under Vespasian. Suetonius preserves the scene that fixes her place in the record: when omens in AD 69 included the Mausoleum of Augustus opening its doors of its own accord, Vespasian joked that the portent must concern Junia Calvina, of the house of Augustus — she being, the point of the joke, the only one left it could summon.
She died around AD 79 — the date is standard-reference, not directly attested, and sits on the verification register. With her the known blood of Augustus ends: roughly a century after Actium, eleven years after the dynasty that ruled on his name fell, the last person carrying the founder’s blood died a private citizen. No source records any descendant after her.
9. The two extinctions
Stated side by side, as facts. The male line of the gens Julia was extinct by c. 40 BC — before Actium, before the empire existed. The blood of Augustus was extinct by c. AD 79 — and it had never once passed from father to son: one daughter, then mothers all the way down. Between the two extinctions stands the whole imperial dynasty called Julian, connected to the first by adoption and to the second by descent lines its own members systematically destroyed: of the named descendants of Augustus in this memo, two died of certain natural causes; the rest ended in exile, prison, poison, assassination or execution, and in nearly every case the order came from inside the house. The name outlived both bloodlines — and the house that had received the name by law proved deadlier to the blood than any enemy of the family had ever been.
10. The deaths in the house, as a dated record
Set out here in the form its companion memo uses for the Herodian executions, so that the two can be read against each other. The narrative sections above give the circumstances; this is the sequence.
- 44 BC — Caesar assassinated. Octavian, eighteen, is named heir in the will.
- 43 BC — the proscriptions (section 2). Cicero killed 7 December; his head and hands fixed to the Rostra.
- 40 BC — Perusia. Three hundred senators and knights reportedly sacrificed at the altar of the deified Julius; the charge is contested.
- 30 BC — Caesarion, Caesar’s only son by blood, killed on Octavian’s order after Alexandria falls. Antony’s eldest son Antyllus killed in the same days. The advice recorded is Arius’s pun: too many Caesars is not a good thing.
- 2 BC — Julia, his only child, exiled by her father under his own morality laws to Pandateria, then Rhegium; she dies in AD 14, the year he does, her confinement having been tightened to deprivation.
- AD 8 — Julia the Younger, his granddaughter, exiled to Trimerus for twenty years; the child born to her in exile is exposed on Augustus’s own order. She dies there in AD 28.
- AD 14 — Agrippa Postumus, his grandson and adopted son, killed by the guard on Planasia within days of Augustus’s death. Tacitus calls it the first crime of the new principate. Who gave the order was disputed in antiquity and is disputed now.
- AD 29–33 — Agrippina the Elder, his granddaughter, arrested, struck in custody with the loss of an eye, exiled to Pandateria and died of starvation in 33. Her sons Nero Caesar (died in confinement on Pontia, 31) and Drusus Caesar (imprisoned on the Palatine, died 33 — Suetonius records him reduced to eating the stuffing of his mattress).
- AD 41 — Caligula, his great-grandson, assassinated with his wife and his daughter Julia Drusilla, not yet two.
- AD 49 — Lucius Silanus, four generations down, prosecuted at Agrippina’s instigation to clear Octavia for Nero; died by his own hand on their wedding day.
- AD 54 — Marcus Junius Silanus, proconsul of Asia, abnepos Augusti, poisoned at dinner: in Tacitus’s account the first death of Nero’s reign, for standing a generation nearer the founder’s blood than the emperor did.
- AD 59 — Agrippina the Younger, killed on the order of her son. The tradition preserves her last instruction to the swordsman: strike the womb.
- AD 63 — Claudia Augusta, Nero’s only child, deified at four months and dead before her first birthday.
- AD 64 — Decimus Silanus Torquatus, driven to open his veins, charged among other things with boasting of his descent from Augustus.
- AD 65 — Lucius Silanus, the nephew, the last male of that line, killed in the purge.
- AD 68 — Nero, the last ruler carrying any of the blood, dead by his own hand.
- c. AD 79 — Junia Calvina, the last known descendant, dies. Vespasian, on the record, makes a joke about the Mausoleum.
The pattern, and the contrast that is the point of this pair. Seventeen entries across a hundred and twenty years. Almost none of them carries a trial. There is no Berytus, no imperial letter of authorisation, no court of a hundred and fifty assessors, no governor of Syria recording a dissenting vote. Where the Herodian executions are hedged about with legal apparatus — which proves nothing about justice but is at least a record — these are prison, exile, starvation, poison, an order to the guard, and a suggestion made to a man who then opens his veins.
And the evidential position is the reverse of the companion memo’s. The Herodian portrait rests on one channel whose partiality its transmitter confesses. This record rests on Tacitus, Suetonius, Dio, Appian, Plutarch, Velleius and Livy’s epitomators — sources hostile to the house and sources friendly to it — and on the proscriptions they agree. Two houses, two records, and the better-attested cruelty belongs to the one that has kept its reputation.
11. The house, member by member
The numbered register of every member drawn on the tree of section 2; the number on each tree box links here, and each entry links back through its kin. Ages here are largely attested in the Roman tradition; the flagged exceptions are in the verification register.
- 1 · Augustus — Gaius Octavius — 63 BC – AD 14, died at seventy-five. Married Clodia, Scribonia, Livia; one biological child ever, Julia (2), by Scribonia — born, Suetonius notes, on the day of the divorce. Adopted in turn Gaius (3), Lucius (4), Agrippa Postumus (7) and Tiberius; his blood ran only through the daughter.
- 2 · Julia — 39 BC – AD 14, died at about fifty-two. Married Marcellus (childless), then Agrippa — the five children below — then Tiberius. Exiled by her father 2 BC under his own morality laws; confined to Pandateria, then Rhegium; died in the year of his death, the confinement tightened to deprivation.
- 3 · Gaius Caesar — 20 BC – AD 4, died at twenty-three. Son of Julia (2) and Agrippa; adopted by Augustus 17 BC; princeps iuventutis; consul AD 1; wounded in Armenia, died at Limyra.
- 4 · Lucius Caesar — 17 BC – AD 2, died at eighteen. Adopted with his brother; died at Massilia en route to Spain.
- 5 · Julia the Younger — c. 19 BC – AD 28, died at about forty-six. Married L. Aemilius Paullus; exiled AD 8; her infant, born in exile, exposed on Augustus’s order; twenty years’ confinement on Trimerus. Daughter: Aemilia Lepida (8).
- 6 · Agrippina the Elder — c. 14 BC – AD 33, died at about forty-six. Married Germanicus; nine children, among them Nero Caesar (9), Drusus Caesar (10), Caligula (11) and Agrippina (12). Arrested by Tiberius AD 29; exiled to Pandateria; a blow in custody took an eye; starved to death.
- 7 · Agrippa Postumus — 12 BC – AD 14, died at twenty-five. Adopted AD 4 with Tiberius; disinherited and confined under guard on Planasia; killed within days of Augustus’s death — Tacitus’s first crime of the principate. The slave Clemens impersonated him two years later.
- 8 · Aemilia Lepida — daughter of Julia the Younger (5); married M. Junius Silanus Torquatus, consul AD 19; mother of the Silani — 13, 14, 15, Junia Calvina (16), and Junia Lepida — the collateral line that carried the blood past the dynasty.
- 9 · Nero Caesar — c. AD 6 – 31, died at about twenty-five. Eldest son of Germanicus and Agrippina (6); heir presumptive; declared a public enemy under Tiberius; dead in confinement on Pontia.
- 10 · Drusus Caesar — c. AD 7 – 33, died at about twenty-six. Imprisoned on the Palatine; Suetonius records him reduced to chewing the stuffing of his mattress.
- 11 · Caligula — Gaius — AD 12 – 41, died at twenty-eight. Emperor from 37; four marriages; one child, Julia Drusilla (17). Assassinated with his wife and daughter, January 41.
- 12 · Agrippina the Younger — AD 15 – 59, died at forty-three. Married Domitius Ahenobarbus — their son is Nero (18) — then Passienus Crispus, then the emperor Claudius, her uncle. Wrote memoirs of her family’s ruin, cited by Tacitus and lost (register 46). Killed at her son’s order; the tradition preserves her last instruction to the swordsman: strike the womb.
- 13 · Marcus Junius Silanus — c. AD 14 – 54, died at about forty. Consul 46; proconsul of Asia; great-great-grandson of Augustus — abnepos Augusti. Poisoned at dinner in AD 54: in Tacitus’s account the first death of Nero’s reign, for standing a generation closer to the founder’s blood than the emperor. His son Lucius, the last male of the line, was killed in the purge of 65.
- 14 · Decimus Junius Silanus Torquatus — c. AD 16 – 64. Consul 53; driven to open his veins in 64, charged among other things with boasting of his descent from Augustus.
- 15 · Lucius Junius Silanus — c. AD 26 – 49. Betrothed to Claudius’s daughter Octavia; prosecuted at Agrippina’s instigation to clear the path for Nero’s match; died by his own hand on the day of Claudius and Agrippina’s wedding.
- 16 · Junia Calvina — c. AD 15 – c. 79, died at about sixty-four. Married L. Vitellius; exiled 49 in her brother’s fall, recalled by Nero after Agrippina’s death; alive under Vespasian, the subject of his Mausoleum joke — the last known descendant of Augustus. The death date is standard-reference and flagged.
- 17 · Julia Drusilla — AD 39 – 41. Caligula’s only child; killed in the hour of her father’s assassination, not yet two.
- 18 · Nero — AD 37 – 68, died at thirty. Son of Agrippina (12); adopted by Claudius 50; emperor 54; married Octavia, Poppaea, Statilia Messalina; one child, Claudia Augusta (19). Ordered his mother’s death, 59. Died by his own hand, June 68 — the last ruler carrying any blood of the founder.
- 19 · Claudia Augusta — January – c. April AD 63. Daughter of Nero and Poppaea; deified at four months; dead before one.
12. The missing documents
- The Memoirs of Agrippina the Younger — the account of her life and her family’s ruin, written by the woman at the centre of sections 4–5; cited by Tacitus as a source for the family’s inner history. Lost. Master register 46.
- Augustus, De vita sua — the founder’s own thirteen-book autobiography. Lost. Master register 18.
- The exile writings and family correspondence — nothing survives in the first person from Julia, either Agrippina, or any of the destroyed generation; their side of every event in this memo passes through the historians of the following century.
13. Sources
Master register numbers refer to the master source register, where each source’s date, distance and survival condition is stated.
- Tacitus, Annals — the killing of Agrippa Postumus as the first crime of the principate (41.1.1); Agrippina the Elder’s end (41.1.6); the matricide (41.1.14); Marcus Silanus as the first death of Nero’s reign, for his descent (41.1.13.1); Decimus (41.1.15.35) and Lucius Silanus (41.1.16.7–9); Agrippina’s memoirs cited (41.1.4.53). Master register 41.
- Suetonius — Julia’s birth and exile, the grandsons (9.2.63–65); the deaths of the imprisoned princes (9.3.54); Caligula’s assassination with his daughter (Caligula — the life’s work-number pends the register’s next extension); Nero’s end (9.4.49); Vespasian’s Junia Calvina joke (9.6.23). Master register 9.
- Cassius Dio, Roman History — the successions and deaths across books 55–63 (11.1.55–63). Master register 11.
- The lost first-person sources are master register items 46 and 18.
- Verification register. Drafted without live access to the source texts. To be checked against the linked editions before revision: the Tacitus passage numbers as cited; the Suetonius passages, including the Caligula life reference, which awaits its work number in the register; the “abnepos Augusti” wording at 41.1.13.1; the Aemilia Lepida link (Julia the Younger → the Silani), which is standard prosopography; the Junia Calvina death date c. AD 79, which is standard-reference and not directly attested; and the exposure of Julia the Younger’s infant (9.2.65). The suspicion traditions against Livia are cited as claims, not findings. The member register’s ages and the Silani genealogy (the AD 49 brother against the AD 65 nephew, son of Marcus) follow the standard references and are to be checked with the rest. The proscriptions chapter rests on Appian Civil Wars 4, Suetonius Augustus 27 (with the Julius Saturninus notice), Livy’s Periochae, Florus, Plutarch’s Brutus, Cicero and Antony, Cassius Dio, Velleius Paterculus, Hinard’s Les proscriptions de la Rome républicaine (1985), and the Res Gestae Divi Augusti; the reward figures, the named-victim count and the Perusia dispute are to be checked with the rest.
Murrell, B. (2026). The Julii of Rome: Octavian’s House and the Name of Caesar. Moral’s Mark — MMM Memo Series, The Caesar–Cleopatra Period Claimants Thread, v1.3 (27 August 2026). https://moralsmark.com/memo-julii-of-rome