The Name After the Blood, 44 BC – AD 90

The name lane fills. The blood lane empties.

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The Master Timeline

40 BC 30 BC 20 BC 10 BC AD 1 AD 10 AD 20 AD 30 AD 40 AD 50 AD 60 AD 70 AD 80 AD 90 THE NAME — BY LAW, TITLE AND GRANT THE BLOOD 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
The Name — adoption, accession, grant, imposture The Blood — the attested line itself Death — large ring marks an ending of the line Error bar — the dating window
  1. 1Apr 44 BCThe false Marius executed
  2. 2May 44 BCOctavian takes the name
  3. 342 BCCaesar becomes a god
  4. 4c. 40 BCThe gens extinct in the male line
  5. 5late Aug 30 BCCaesarion executed
  6. 627 BCAugustus: the name without the line
  7. 717 BCGaius and Lucius adopted
  8. 8AD 4Tiberius adopted, adopts
  9. 9AD 14Augustus dies; the name passes
  10. 10AD 16Clemens: “the same way you made yourself Caesar”
  11. 11AD 37Caligula: blood through women only
  12. 12AD 41A client king named Julius
  13. 13AD 41Claudius: the name by accession
  14. 14AD 50Nero adopted
  15. 15AD 54Nero emperor
  16. 16AD 68Nero: the last of the blood
  17. 17AD 68Galba: the name becomes the office
  18. 18AD 69The first false Nero
  19. 19c. AD 80The second false Nero
  20. 20c. AD 88The third false Nero

Each numbered marker links to its row in the event register below. This page draws the argument of the period in one picture: after the Ides, everything that happens to the Julian name happens on the upper lane — adoption, deification, accession, enfranchised client kings, impostors — while the lower lane, the blood itself, carries three markers and is finished. Closely spaced events are fanned rightward for readability at 7.6 pixels per year; the register carries the true dates. This period continues The Julii, trad. 1184–27 BC and overlaps Rome and Egypt, 100–30 BC by design.

The Genealogy

The succession the timeline follows, drawn as a tree: no ruler in it hangs from the gens by a solid line. The full statement is in The Julii sections 9–10 and The Julii of Judaea section 10.

THE GENS JULIA — MALE LINEextinct c. 40 BC THE JULII CAESARES, cousinsL. Caesar cos. 90 †87 C. JULIUS CAESARdictator †44 BC L. Caesar cos. 64†c. 40 — the last male Juliamother of Antony AUGUSTUSadopted 44 · blood via his mother’s mother M. ANTONIUS†30 — the other maternal Julian Gaius Caesar†AD 4 Lucius Caesar†AD 2 TIBERIUSno Julian blood at all GERMANICUSblood via Octavia’s line CLAUDIUSno adoption — the name by accession CALIGULA†41, assassinated NERO†68 — the last blood on the throne GALBA, AD 68no blood, no adoption: the name as office male-line descent through a woman grant / adoption bore the name as ruler killed / died by violence
Line conventions: solid for male-line blood, dotted for descent through a woman, dashed gold for adoption and grant; gold boxes bore the name as rulers; ringed boxes were killed. Simplified to the named figures of the record; relationships per the sources in the register, with the prosopographic links on the memo’s verification register.

The Event Register

№DateLaneEventRefs
1Apr 44 BCTHE NAME Amatius, the false Marius — an impostor claiming kinship with Caesar through the Marian marriage — builds an altar at the pyre site and draws crowds. Antony has him executed without trial. The first man killed over a claimed connection to the dead dictator, inside a month of the Ides. 10.1.3 2.1.14
2May 44 BCTHE NAME Gaius Octavius arrives in Rome and takes the name of the will: Gaius Julius Caesar. A male-line Octavius, a Julian through his mother’s line — the name now runs on adoption. 10.1.3 9.2.7 M2 §9
342 BCTHE NAME Caesar deified by the state: Divus Julius. The adopted heir becomes divi filius — son of a god — by the same instrument that made him a Julian: law, not blood. 11.1.47
4c. 40 BCTHE BLOOD Lucius Julius Caesar, consul of 64 — spared in the proscriptions when his sister Julia, Antony’s mother, faced the death squads at her door — dies without surviving sons. The male gens Julia, of every branch, is extinct. 10.1.4 M2 §9
5late Aug 30 BCTHE BLOOD Caesarion, the attested natural son, executed in Alexandria on the adopted heir’s order. The last claimed male blood of Caesar’s own line. 8.2.81 11.1 M2 §9
627 BCTHE NAME Octavian takes the name Augustus. The Julian name rules; the Julian male line is gone. 6.1 11.1 M2 §10
717 BCTHE NAME Augustus adopts his grandsons Gaius and Lucius Caesar — his blood through his daughter Julia; Julians by adoption, as he is. Both die young, AD 2 and AD 4. 11.1.54
8AD 4THE NAME Augustus adopts Tiberius — a Claudian, with no Julian blood at all — and requires Tiberius, on the same day, to adopt Germanicus. The succession is now adoption stacked on adoption. 9.3.15 11.1.55
9AD 14THE NAME Augustus dies. The name Caesar passes by adoption for the second time — to a man with no drop of the family’s blood. 9.2.100
10AD 16THE NAME Clemens, a slave impersonating the dead Agrippa Postumus, gathers a following. Asked by Tiberius how he had made himself Agrippa, he answers: the same way you made yourself Caesar. Killed secretly. 41.1.2.39
11AD 37THE NAME Gaius (Caligula), son of Germanicus, becomes emperor — Julian blood in him only through women, at every link of the chain. 11.1.59
12AD 41THE NAME Marcus Julius Agrippa — grandson of Herod — made king of Judaea. The family were Julii by enfranchisement: Caesar’s grant of citizenship to Antipater in 47 BC carried the family name to his clients, and client kings now wear it. 42.1.18 42.2.2 M4 §5
13AD 41THE NAME Claudius made emperor by the Praetorians. No adoption ever made him a Julius; he takes the name Caesar by accession alone — the first time the name moves as a title, not an inheritance. 11.1.60
14AD 50THE NAME Claudius adopts Nero — the fourth adoption in the chain that keeps the dynasty “Julian”. 41.1.12.25
15AD 54THE NAME Nero becomes emperor. 41.1.12.69
16AD 68THE BLOOD Nero dies. With him dies the last emperor carrying any blood of the Julii — and that blood, at every step back to Caesar’s sister, had passed through women. 9.4.49
17AD 68THE NAME Galba — no relation, no adoption by the house — takes the name Caesar on accession. The name is now an office of the Roman state. 41.2.1 M2 §10
18AD 69THE NAME The first false Nero — an impostor gathering ships and men in the Aegean — is hunted down and killed. 41.2.2.8
19c. AD 80THE NAME A second false Nero — Terentius Maximus — appears in the East and finds refuge across the Euphrates with the Parthians. 11.1.66
20c. AD 88THE NAME A third false Nero, twenty years after the death — the name still being claimed by men who never bore it, a generation after the last of the blood was gone. 9.4.57

Reference codes read source . work . passage against the master source register. Green M2 chips link to the section of The Julii covering the event; the claimant events carry no memo chip yet — they receive them when the claimants memo publishes. The register cites the earliest attestation, not the most familiar one.

The Sources of This Period

Numbers are master register numbers — permanent across the whole timelines project; the full register lives at the master source register. The biographical sources of the earlier periods — Nicolaus (5), the Res Gestae (6), Plutarch (8) — also serve this period through the reference codes above.

  1. 9 · Suetonius — ~AD 121, imperial secretary to Hadrian with access to the archives. The will (9.1.83), the Cinna bill (9.1.52.3), the Oppius pamphlet (9.1.52.2), the funeral and Cinna’s death (9.1.85). The opening of the Divus Julius is lost in transmission; it begins in Caesar’s sixteenth year.9.1 Divus Julius · 9.2 Divus Augustus · 9.3 Tiberius · 9.4 Nero
  2. 10 · Appian — ~AD 150s, Alexandrian Greek in Roman service, drawing on Pollio. The statue in Venus Genetrix (10.1.2.102), the funeral, the triumviral wars.10.1 Civil Wars
  3. 11 · Cassius Dio — ~AD 200–230, some 250 years after, Roman senator writing in Greek. The fullest connected narrative; the Sibylline report “whether true or false” (11.1.44.15); the fate of the statue (11.1.51.22); the end in Alexandria (11.1.51.10–15).11.1 Roman History
  4. 41 · Tacitus — ~AD 110–120, senator writing under Trajan, two generations after the events of the Julio-Claudian court he records. The Clemens interrogation (41.1.2.39–40); the adoption of Nero (41.1.12.25); the first false Nero (41.2.2.8).41.1 Annals · 41.2 Histories
  5. 42 · Josephus — ~AD 75–94, Judaean priest and Flavian client, writing within living memory of the Herodian court. Caesar’s grant of citizenship to Antipater, 47 BC (42.1.14; 42.2.1.194); the reigns of the enfranchised kings (42.1.18–19).42.1 Antiquities of the Jews · 42.2 The Jewish War
  6. 18 · Augustus, De vita sua — his memoirs in thirteen books. Lost; its account shaped the surviving tradition before disappearing.

Memos for This Period

Held as references, per the stream rule — the arguments live in the memos; the timeline states only what is attested and by whom.

  1. The Julii: From Troy to the Ides — the family companion; its sections 9–10 cover the endings this page opens with
  2. Caesar, to the Ides — Part 1: the life whose will set this period in motion
  3. The Julii of Judaea: Herod’s House and the Name of Caesar — the enfranchised line followed in full, from the grant of 47 BC to the consul of AD 116–117
  4. The claimants memo — the adopted, the enfranchised and the impostors — is in preparation; the claimant events above receive their chips when it publishes.

A Note on the Dating

Every event on this page is attested in the surviving record; the dashed markers carry a dating window, not a doubt about the event. The chart crosses from BC to AD with no year zero — the scale runs astronomical years beneath the labels. What the two lanes state is the finding of the period, drawn rather than argued: from the Ides forward, the Julian name moves nineteen times by law, title, grant and imposture, and the blood moves three — each of its three markers an ending. The name’s carriers after 44 BC are, without exception, connected to the family through women, through adoption, through citizenship grants, or through nothing at all.

Format — TIMELINE-FORMAT-SPEC v1.4

This page follows the period-page format with a thematic lane split: a lane for the legal and titular history of a name, a lane for the bloodline it claimed to carry, every event referenced to the master register, memo chips linking each covered event to the section that covers it, and dating windows drawn as error bars.

House rules: every event carries numbered references, linked to the master register · the register states no interpretation as an event · estimated means flagged, not resolved · the earliest attestation is cited.