ABSTRACT
It was certainly political interest, rather than any personal affinity, that brought Julia’s parents together in marriage. They probably did not meet until 40 BCE, but to understand their careers will require us to go back to the outbreak of the civil war ten years earlier. Let us begin with her mother Scribonia, since even if she was not, as Syme 1939: 229) unfairly described her, Octavian’s ‘senior by many years and a disagreeable character’,1
Scribonia began adult life somewhat before her new husband. So how old was Scribonia? She is usually identified as the younger sister of the Pompeian Scribonius Libo, who must have been born around 90 BCE, since he had reached the praetorship before the civil war broke out in 49 BCE. Libo was not important in his own right, but in the years after Caesar’s murder, Octavian had to keep on good terms with Libo’s son-in-law, Pompey’s younger son Sextus Pompeius, who controlled Sicily and was in a position to starve Italy of essential food supplies. As Libo’s sister, we would expect her to be quite close to him in age – perhaps over forty in 40 BCE. But since we have evidence that Scribonia was still alive and in full possession of her wits in 16 CE, she must have been born after 70, and at least twenty years younger. More recently John Scheid, noting that she is referred to as the aunt, not the great-aunt, of Libo Drusus, has suggested that Scribonia was an otherwise unattested second daughter of this Libo, rather than his sister. Her formal name would have been exactly the same. But this in turn seems to conflict with her marital history: certainly Suetonius attests that she had been married twice before the union with Octavian, first to the Consul of 56 BCE, Cn. Cornelius Lentulus Marcellinus. However, given his seniority and probable age, it is most unlikely that she was his first wife. In fact it is also quite unlikely that she was the mother of his son, Lentulus Marcellinus, named by Caesar as the quaestor put in command of his fortifications at Dyrrhachium in 48 BCE.2 Quaestors were usually at least twenty-five years old, so for this young man to have been Scribonia’s child, she would need to have married Marcellinus by 74 and so be born at latest soon after 90 BCE. On the other hand, an inscription by a group of freedmen records the joint patronage of Scribonia and a Lentulus Marcellinus, identified as her son. Perhaps this man was only a younger half-brother of Caesar’s quaestor.
