ABSTRACT
When the consul Caius Marius was informed on the 13th of the month Quintilis in the year 100 BCE that his brother-in-law’s wife had given birth to a healthy baby boy, he had no way of knowing – in the midst of his many and serious official preoccupations during that summer – that this was by far the most important event of the year, indeed one of the most important in all of Roman history. It certainly couldn’t have entered his mind that even his own unprecedentedly glorious career was to be so eclipsed by the newborn baby, that today he is largely forgotten, while his nephew remains one of the most famous men in history. How famous is illustrated by a simple fact: some 55 years later, the month Quintilis was renamed in honour of the baby born that day, and continues to bear its new name to the present time – July, in honour of Caius Julius Caesar.
