Life
Named after her late aunt and her father's favorite sister, Julia Drusilla, Julia was born not long after Caligula married Caesonia (some sources have her being born on the same day as the marriage). The date of her parents' marriage has not been determined for sure, but it is known that it was sometime in the summer of AD 39. When Drusilla, as the child was called, was born, Caligula took her to a temple that housed statues of goddesses and placed her on the lap of Minerva, instructing the goddess to nurse and train his new daughter. The reason of Caligula's hasted marriage with the neither young nor beautiful Milonia Caesonia was the purported illegitimacy of his daughter: should Caligula marry his daughter's mother, the child would become his heir.
The order of events suggests that he did not want to marry until a child of his had already been born, a child who would be the purpose of the union. Soon after her birth, Caligula set up donation boxes around Rome marked "Julia's Drink" or "Julia's Food". According to the ancient historian Suetonius, Caligula believed that Minerva would supervise his daughter's growth and education. Suetonius further claims that " considered as his own child for no better reason than her savage temper, which was such even in her infancy, that she would attack with her nails the face and eyes of the children at play with her."
Read more about this topic: Julia Drusilla (daughter Of Caligula)
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The great end of life is not knowledge, but action. What men need is as much knowledge as they can assimilate and organize into a basis for action; give them more and it may become injurious. One knows people who are as heavy and stupid from undigested learning as other are from over-fulness of meat and drink.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)