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‘Julians and Claudians’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

B. Levick
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Extract

Optimates and Populares, Roundheads and Cavaliers, Whigs and Tories, Cowboys and Indians: the neat antitheses polarize views and enlist sympathies. Nor are they all misleading. What of ‘Julians and Claudians’? These labels were invented to distinguish ‘factions’ or ‘parties’ within the family of Augustus; the issue between them was the succession and the struggle continued until the end of the principate of Augustus' heir Tiberius. Thus comprehensible order is brought to the confused mass of information and opinion that the sources offer us. Moreover, the labels have a respectable pedigree in modern writing. They are constantly employed by F. B. Marsh in his authoritative work and survive as valid and useful in articles more recently published; where historians have trodden so boldly literary critics have not hesitated to follow. My purpose, at the cost of destroying neat and treasured theory, is to show that these terms are inapplicable to the two groups to which they have been applied, and therefore misleading. They are an impediment to serious inquiry into. complex and changing situations.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , April 1975 , pp. 29 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1975

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References

page 29 note 1 Marsh, F. B., The Reign of Tiberius (Oxford, 1931; repr. 1959)Google Scholar; Shotter, D. C., ‘Julians, Claudians and the Accession of Tiberius’, Latomus xxx (1971), 1117 ff.Google Scholar; Ferrill, A., ‘Prosopography and the Last Years of Augustus’, Historia xx (1971), 718 ff.Google ScholarScullard, H. H., From the Gracchi to Nero 2 (London, 1971), 279 n. 3Google Scholar, is much more circumspect. Wilkinson, L. P., Ovid Recalled (Cambridge, 1955), 299Google Scholar, writes: ‘… the poet became involved in the dynastic tension between the Julians and the Claudians.’

page 29 note 2 So Suet. Tib. 15. 2.Google Scholar

page 30 note 1 Suet. Tib. 3. 1.Google Scholar

page 30 note 2 Vell. Pat. ii. 104. 1Google Scholar; Suet. Tib. 21. 3.Google Scholar

page 31 note 1 Iust. Inst. i. 2. 11.Google Scholar

page 31 note 2 Tac. Ann. i. 2. 1.Google Scholar

page 31 note 3 Tac. Ann. i. 52. 2 and ii. 59. 3.Google Scholar

page 31 note 4 Tac. Ann. ii. 43. 7: ‘fratres egregie Concordes’.Google Scholar

page 32 note 1 For all these events see Dio lv. 25 ff.; they are discussed by B. Levick in ‘The Fall of the younger Julia’, a paper offered to Latomus.

page 33 note 1 See Levick, , Latomus xxxi (1972), 779 ff.Google Scholar

page 33 note 2 Vell. Pat. ii. 100. 4 f.Google Scholar

page 33 note 3 Tac. Ann. iii. 24.Google Scholar

page 34 note 1 Sen. Ep. 70. 10.Google Scholar

page 35 note 1 Tac. Ann. ii. 27 ff. and 39 f.Google Scholar

page 35 note 2 Criminal Trials and Criminal Legislation under Tiberius (Middletown, 1935), 12 ff.Google Scholar

page 35 note 3 Elucidated by Weinrib, E. J. in HSCP lxxii (1967), 247 ff.Google Scholar

page 35 note 4 Sen. Ep. 70. 10Google Scholar; cf. Tac. Ann. ii. 29. 1Google Scholar: ‘cum primoribus feminis’.

page 36 note 1 Tac. Ann. iv. 53. 1Google Scholar; see D. C. Shorter, art. cit. (p. 29 n. 1).

page 38 note 1 Tac. Ann. i. 14. 3 and v. 2.Google Scholar