ABSTRACT
The lives of elite Roman women were essentially determined by their marriages, and so the story of Julia, daughter of Augustus, was inevitably shaped by her marriages and their outcome. Despite the lapse of two millennia there are quite a number of ways in which Roman elite families behaved like the privileged families of modern North America or Europe, and had similar aspirations for their children. But they had far more control over the marital choice of their children of either sex than we have known in the past 100 years. We are best informed about families with both wealth and political standing, whose largely inherited money would follow both their sons and their daughters. But when a daughter became a wife, family wealth would pass through her dowry and other rights of inheritance into the family of her husband.
