Cadet line of Servilii Caepiones

Cn.Servilius Caepio cos.253 (b.c.295/85) | | Cn.Servilius Caepio pontifex cos.203 (b.c.245/40) | ___________|___________ | | [Q.Caepio] Cn.Servilius Caepio L.Iulius (Caesar) (b.c.212) cos.169, aed.179 pr.166 (b.c.206) | (born c.215) | | ↓ | | ↓ | c.141 Cn.Caepio [main line] C.Iulius Caesar = Marcia of (b.c.190) (b.c.170/65) | the Reges [pr.150?] |(b.c.160/55) | | ____________|_______________________________ ___|________ c.146 | c.135 | | c.123 | |Cornelius = (1)Servilia(2) = Appuleius Q.Caepio Cn.f. Cn.Caepio Q.Granius = Iulia Mari C.CaesarDolabella | (b.c.162) | Saturninus leg.Asia 129-26 (c.165-98/7) (b.c.140s)|(c.138-70s) (c.140-87)(b.170s) | | (b.c.160) q.c.138 | pr.c.100 | | | | | | | | ? | | | Cn.Dolabella | _____________|__ |_________ | Saturnini frater L.Appuleius c.116 | | c.107? | | | (c.145-100) Saturninus Q.Catulus = Servilia Cn.Caepio Cn.f.=?[Grania] Q.Granius | | tr.pl.103 (149-87) | fem.primaria (c.135-c.97) | (b.c.122) (b.c.120) | | (c.134-100) cos.102 |(c.130-post 70) q.c.108 | C.Caesar | | | (102-44) Cn.Dolabella | | | pr.urb.81 c.93-60s | c.100-97 | | (b.125/21) Q.Hortensius = (2) Lutatia (1) = M.Minucius Rufus | | | orator cos.69| (c.114-60s) | (c.120s-c.97) | Iulia | (114-50) | | shipwrecked? | (70s-54) | | | |P.Lentulus Dolabella _______|_______ | _______|______cos.suff.44 (80-43) | | | c.83 | | c.92[one of Caesar's Q.Hortensius Q.f. Hortensia Minucia = Caepio “avus” Servilia Cn. = Ap.Claudius putative bastards] pr.45 (b.c.85) oratrix (b.c.99) | (b.c.104) Caepionis f. | tr.mil.87 IIvir nav.49 IIvir nav.49 (b.c.91) | (b.c.106) | (b.110s) | | | c.60 | ________________ | Alfidia = M.Livius Drusus | | 59/8 | 59 of Fundi | Claudianus pr.50 C.Fannius M.f. [Fannia] = Q.Caepio ≠ Iulia (b.c.74) | (90-42) (c.81-43/2) b.c.74 |(c.82-10s) (70s-54) | q.c.50 | q.c.50 | | | | | C.Fannius C.f.Caepio Livia Drusilla (58/7-22 BC) (Iulia Augusta) (58 BC-29 CE)

This chart describes a theoretical common Caesarian descent of the near (perhaps exact) coevals the empress LiviaDrusilla and Fannius Caepio, the conspirator against Imp. Caesar in 22 BC. While their common patrician Servilian ancestry is evidence based and likely enough, the Caesarian connection depends upon a speculative marriage of Cn. Caepio q. c.108 to a supposed sister of Caesar the dictator's cousin, Q. Granius, for which there is no evidence at all apart from a neat match of generational chronology in all three families, and a presumption that Livia's importance to Imp. Caesar (of the insignificant praetorian house of Octavii) was due partly, and initially largely, to propinquitas with the Caesars in both her Claudian family of birth and Livian family of adoption. The Livian propinquitas with Caesars is recorded (Suet. Div.Iul. 1).

Evidence & annotation 2

Q. Caepio Cn. f., legatus to Mn. Aquillius in Asia, 129-126 BC

Known from two Greek inscriptions found in Roman Asia province. The Bargylia Inscription (iIasos 612) 1 records him holding a military command in Caria under Mn. Aquillius, subordinate in rank to the legatus pro praetore Cn. Domitius (q. 138/35, mint IIIvir c. 130, cos. 122). His filiation Cn. f. and formal post as legate are recorded in a fragmentary text from Maeonia in Lydia describing military dispositions (TAM v, 1, 528 = BE 1963, p. 165 no. 220) :

...]ΗΝΩΝ ΚΑΙ ΧΟΙΡΟΜΕ[...ΤΩΝ ΚΑΙ ΤΑΡΣΙΑΝΩΝ ΤΩΝ ΠΡΟΤΕ-[ρ]ΟΝ ΥΠΟ ΔΙΟΚΛΗΝ ΣΤΡΑΤΗΓΟΝ Η-ΓΕΜΩΝ ΚΑΙ ΣΤΡΑΤΙΩΤΑΙ ΟΙ ΔΙΑ-ΤΑΓΕΝΤΕΣ ΕΙΣ ΤΟ ΧΩΡΙΟΝ ΥΠΕΡ[Ηφ]ΑΙΣΤΙΩΝΟΣ ΑΛΚΑΙΟΥ ΣΑΡΔΙ-[ανο]Υ ΤΟΥ ΚΑΤΑΣΤΑΘΕΝΤΟΣ [υπο] ΚΟΙΝΤΟΥ ΣΕΡΟΗΛΙΟΥ ΓΝ[αιου][υιου Και]ΠΙΩΝΟΣ ΠΡΕΣΒΕΥΤΟ[υ][Ρωμαιω]Ν ΕΠΙ ΤΟΥ ΟΧΥΡΩΜΑ[τος][. . . κ]ΑΙ ΜΗΤΡΙ ΑΚΡΑΙΑΙ [αν]-[δραγαθιας ε]ΝΕΚΕΝ ΚΑΙ ΕΥ[νοιας]- - - - - -

(legible but incomplete letters, conventionally represented complete with a dot beneath, are in grey tone capitals here, fully preserved letters in black caps)

Although the initial letters of the paternal forename were incompletely preserved on the stone, the second letters of the forenames Quintus and Gnaeus (omikron and nau in the Greek genitive forms ΚΟΙΝΤΟΥ and ΓΝΑΙΟΥ), are so different in shape that even incomplete they cannot be confused. This assures the reading Gnaei (filius). Military operations by land in Asia province between the Aquillian command and the First Mithridatic War were extremely rare, perhaps non-existent. Sincethis document also included the ethnic in the legate's title, which was phased out in Asia province during the earlier Mithridatic Wars, it must date before the 80s BC 2. No Q. Caepio Cn. f. of the

1 Also M. Holleaux REA 21 (1919), 7-16, and an annotated translation of the most important parts of the text in R. K.Sherk, Rome and the Greek East to the death of Augustus (TDGR vol. 4, Cambridge UP, 1984) no. 43, at pp. 43-45. Dittenberger reproduced Foucart's Rev. Arch. 1903 excerpts at the end of OGIS (vol. II, Addenda, p. 551).

2 This phenomenon and its significance have largely receded from recent scholarship, but were well known to the great German expert on Republican prosopography, Friedrich Münzer, who employed them in his discussion of Servilii Caepiones in RA ; i.e. Römische Adelsparteien und Adelsfamilien (J. B. Metzler, Stuttgart, 1920), at p. 234 in the English translation by Thérèse Ridley, Roman Aristocratic Parties and Families (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Hereafter cited as RA 1920/1999. Since Münzer's time more Greek inscriptions have been published honouring L. Lucullus and his Licinii Murenae relatives in the east throughout the 80s BC, none of them exhibiting the ethnic (SIG 743 and AE 1974, 603, both from Hypata, are especially notable as they date to Lucullus' quaestura, and so as early as autumn 88 BC).

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appropriate age and rank to hold a legatio took any part in the initial Mithridatic Wars, so the identification of the legate with the Aquillian officer Q. Caepio of the Bargylia Inscription is not in doubt.Two viri consulares named Q. Servilius Caepio are on record, both in the second half of the 2nd century BC ; the consul 140 and the pontifex maximus consul of 106. Following earlier authorities like Foucart, Münzer identified the Aquillian legate with the cos. 106 (RE Servilius 49), who was born 149, or a little earlier, and thus barely old enough to be military tribune in 129, let alone a legatus. He was not even a senator for another decade, later still if he missed the lectio senatus of 120. Furthermore the homonymous son of the 106 consul was born in the second half of 127 BC ; urban quaestor 100 (ad Herenn. I, 21) hence a birthdate in or before 127, though still iuvenis at the time of his death in summer 90 BC (Eutropius V, 3.2), so not yet 37 and therefore born after mid 127. Thus his father should have been in Italy and Rome at the time of his conception around winter 128-27, or spring 127 BC. Aquillius triumphed on 3 Nov. in year 627, or Julian 31 Oct. 126 BC 3, so probably returned to Rome with his staff after 127 BC. Despite such clear reasons for excluding the consul of 106, Münzer's thesis continues to be the standard identification (e.g. MRR III, 194), and the cadet line of Servilii Caepiones overlooked. Q. Caepio consul 140 (born c.185/83) would have been in his mid fifties in 129 BC, by no means too old for a legatio. The service of D. Brutus Callaicus (cos. 138) under the other consul of 129, C. Sempronius Tuditanus, provides a good parallel. However in the Bargylia Inscription Aquillius' senior legate, with imperium praetorium in Caria delegated by his commander, was Cn. Domitius the later consul 122 (born 165 or earlier), while Q. Caepio operated in Caria without delegated command rights, and so was subordinate in rank to Domitius (lines 13-17) :

ΜΑΝΙΟΥ ΤΕΑΚΥΛΛΙΟΥ ΤΟΥ ΡΩΜΑΙΩΝ ΣΤΡΑΤΗΓΟΥ ΑΝΑΖΕΥΞΑΝΤΟΣ ΕΠ[ι] ΜΥΣΙΑΣΤΗΣ ΚΑΛΟΥΜΕΝΗΣ ΑΒ[β]ΑΙΤΙΔΟΣ ΕΙΣ ΤΟΥΣ ΑΝΩ ΤΟΠΟΥΣ ΑΠΟΛΙΠΟΝΤΟΣ ΔΕΕΝ ΤΗ(ι) [Καρ]ΙΑ(ι) ΑΝΤΙΣΤΡΑΤΗΓΟΝ ΓΝΑΙΟΝ ΔΟΜΕΤΙΟΝ ΓΝΑΙΟΥ ΚΑΙ ΤΙΝΑΣ ΤΩΝ ΔΥ- ΝΑ[μεων απ]ΟΤΑΞΑΝΤΟΣ ΑΥΤΩΙ ΚΑΙ ΤΟΥΣ ΠΛΕΙΣΤΟΥΣ ΤΩΝ ΣΥΜΜΑΧΩΝ, etc.

(and lines 23-27): [- - - μηκυνομενουδε τ]ΟΥ ΠΟΛΕΜΟΥ ΣΥΝΕ[β]ΑΙΝΕΝ Θ[λ]ΙΒΕΣΘΑΙ ΤΗΝ ΠΟΛΙΝ [την ημετεραν δια το υπο] ΤΗΣ ΚΟΙΝΤΟΥ ΚΑΙΠΙΩ[ν]ΟΣ ΕΠΙΤΑΓΗΣ ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟ ΣΥΝΕΧΕΣ [αει τους πολιτας εστ]ΡΑΤΕΥΚΕΝΑΙ ΕΞΑΠΕΣΤΑΛΘΑΙ ΔΕ ΥΠΟ ΤΟΥ ΔΗΜΟΥ ΚΑΙ ΑΠΟ [της αρχης στρτατιω-τ]ΑΣ ΕΙΣ ΤΟΝ ΠΟΛΕΜΟΝ ΚΑΙ ΠΛΕΙΟΝΑΣ Ε[πη]ΚΟΛΟΥΘΗΚΕΝΑΙ, etc.

3 See A. Degrassi, Inscriptiones Italiae XIII, 1 : Fasti Consulares et Triumphales (Rome, 1947), p. 559 ; henceforth Degrassi 1947. The Julian date follows the intercalation model of C. J. Bennett, most conveniently accessible at his Ptolemaic website ;

http://www.tyndalehouse.com/Egypt/ptolemies/ptolemies.htm

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It's not possible for a vir consularis of more than a decade's standing to have been subordinated to a senator below praetorian rank in any circumstances. The senior lines of Caepiones descended from the two consular sons of Cn. Caepio (cos. 169). The Aquillian legate's filiation excludes the paternity of Q. Caepio consul 140, while only the legate or the homonymous consul 106 can be son of Gnaeus consul 141 and censor 125-24 BC, but not both. The bare fact of the one obtaining the consulate and the other not is suggestive. More significant, however, is a small fragment of the fasti Capitolini first published in 1904, registering on three successive lines the filiations of three consuls in three successive years (no. XXXIII in Degrassi 1947, at pp. 54-55) :

- - -] C.F.C.N[epos- - -]IVS CN.F.CN.[n. - - - - - -]S CN.F.M[.n. ; else a cognomen beginning with M

Gnaeus was not a very common forename, so that its iteration in the forenames or filiations of successive consuls is something of a rarity. Since Gaius Marius (cos. I 107) is independently attested with the filiation C. f. (e.g. the ILS 59 elogium) and Mallius Maximus (cos. 105) as Cn. f. 4, it is clear that this fragment pertains to 107-105 BC and establishes the full filiation of Q. Caepio cos. 106 5. Thus the latter continued the senior line of Caepiones as grandson of Gnaeus cos. 169, and son of Gnaeus the censor (and cos. 141). The ancestry of the Aquillian legate and his posterity presumably went back to the Second PunicWar consular, Cn. Caepio the pontifex, via an unattested second son named Quintus. The legate looks to have been born c.160, with a quaestura around 133 BC, in time for admission to the Senate in the lectio of 131. He may have held a praetura about 120 if he lived long enough ; and there are plenty of gaps in the meagre record of the six annual praetors between the end of Livy's text and the 90s BC.

Q. Granius the step-son (ΠΡΟΓΟΝΟΣ) of C. Marius in 88 BC (Plutarch, Marius 35.6) Declared a public enemy with Marius by the consuls Sulla and Pompeius Rufus in 88, he fled Italy, joining up with Marius on the island of Aenaria and thence escaping to African waters 6. Caesar's

4 ILLRP 8 (the Antian fasti) = inscription no. 3 in Degrassi 1947 ; and RDGE 16.

5 As in Degrassi 1947, p. 55, etc. See also the comments in MRR I, 552-555, tracing the attribution back to Münzer'scontemporary Conrad Cichorius, in Römische Studien (Teubner, 1922). Since the identical filiation of the homonymous consul of 140 BC survives almost complete in a different fragment (no. XXVI in Degrassi 1947, pp. 52-53), Cichorius' case is secure, and has been treated as such since its endorsement by Degrassi, and by T. R. S. Broughton in MRR vol. I (1951). Münzer's RA was published shortly before Cichorius' RS, which explains his overlooking the significance of fragment XXXIII for the lineage of Q. Caepio cos. 106, and his conviction that the latter was son f Q. Caepio cos. 140 (see RE Servilius 49, col. 1783 : “ohne Zweifel” ; reiterated in RA 1920/1999, p.233, and the Table 12 stemma of Servilii Caepiones at p. 228).

6 Appian R.Em. 1, 60-62, and Plut. Mar. 37, 40.

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aunt, known as Iulia Mari from her famous marriage, died shortly before Caesar's quaestura of 69 BC, when he delivered a public laudation in her honour (Suet. Div.Iul. 6.1, with details of her lineage). There is no evidence or likelihood of Marius divorcing her and re-marrying the former wife of a Granius by 88. It follows then that Marius' step-son in 88, Q. Granius, was Iulia's son by an initial Granian marriage (c.123) which preceded the Marian (c.112). This suits the generational chronology of her three brothers ; Caius father of the dictator (pr. c.100, born c.140), then a Lucius, finally Sextus Caesar consul in 91 (born 134 or earlier). All four siblings were born in the period c.140-134 BC. Iulia Mari fits in with a birthdate c.138, as second child of C. Caesar and Marcia of the Reges.

Fraternity of L. Appuleius Saturninus (tr.pl. 103 and 100) and Cn. Cornelius Dolabella slain in the forum Holitorium in September 100 BC

Orosius V, 17.9 :cum autem ipse Saturninus7 et Saufeius et Labienus, cogente Mario, in curiam confugissent, per equites Romanos effractis foribus occisi sunt. C. Glaucia extractus e domo Claudii trucidatus est. (10) Furius tribunus plebi bona omnium publicanda decrevit. Cn. Dolabella Saturnini frater per forum holitorium fugiens cum L. Giganio interfectus est.

There was considerable variation in Latin uses of frater in the late Republic, though as applied to men of different gentes it most commonly denotes uterine brothers. Orosius was a Christian era writer but mainly followed a detailed epitome of Livy on the politics of the Republic.

Propinquitas of Q. Caepio (q.urb. 100) and Cn. Dolabella (pr.urb. 81)

In his speech pro M. Scauro Cicero records that Q. Caepio (urban quaestor 100) was propinquus of Cn. Dolabella (later urban praetor 81) the subscriptor to his prosecution of M. Aemilius Scaurus theprinceps senatus in 91 BC 8. This remembered relationship shows that either Dolabella descended from a recent family marriage with a Servilia of the Caepiones, or Caepio from a recent family

7 The new Budé text of Orosius IV-VI (ed. Marie-Pierre Arnaud-Lindet, 2003) prints “Saturnius” for Saturninus at 17.9, though with correct orthography at 17.8 (twice) and 17.10, and always correct in the French translation facing.

8 Cic. Scaur. 45 fragment at Ascon. 30G = 26C : Dolabella paternus inimicus qui cum Q. Caepione propinquo suo contra Scaurum patrem suum <sub>signaverat. On the identification of this Dolabella (the urban praetor 81, prosecuted in turn by the princeps' son, the pr. 56, from his Cilician command in 78), see Ascon. 30G = 26C (ad loc.). The specific context of the prosecution, in early 91 BC following the princeps' Asiatica legatio is provided in a different passage of Asconius (pp. 24-25G = 21C).

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marriage with a Cornelia of the Dolabellae, or that they shared the blood of a third, unknown, family in common. The present reconstruction supposes the first option. The generational chronology works well. It is immaterial that the putative Servilia Dolabellae (uxor), sister of Q. Caepio the Aquillian legate, belonged to the cadet line of Caepiones and the urban quaestor 100 to the senior line. Any ramification of the Caepiones meets the requirements of propinquitas (blood kinship). By 91, and first publically by this very prosecution of Scaurus the princeps, the urban quaestor had abandoned the optimate alliances of his father and his own youth and joined the interests supporting the publican chiefs, with which the other, junior, line of Caepiones was alignedby its popularis and Marian connections.

Servilia Claudi (uxor), daughter of Cn. Caepio

Known from a single but informative sentence in Cicero's letter to Atticus from Astura on the Ides of March, 45 BC (ad Att. XII, 20.2) :

Velim me facias certiorem proximis litteris Cn. Caepio Serviliae Claudi pater vivone patre suo naufragio perierit an mortuo, item Rutilia vivone C. Cotta filio suo mortua sit an mortuo. Pertinentad eum librum quem de luctu minuendo scripsimus.

This text was analysed in Münzer's brilliant appendix to RA, where he examined the historical examples researched by Cicero for his Consolatio on the death of his daughter Tullia (RA 1920/

1999, 365-94, at p. 384). For the reasons set forth there, it appears certain that in this case Atticus'answer must have come back in the negative : that the father had (shortly) predeceased him by the time Cn. Caepio's life ended prematurely in shipwreck. However they must have died in close proximity, presumably within a year or two. Münzer (RA 1920/1999, 228, 233-35) identified Cn. Caepio the father of Servilia Claudi, as a late son of Cn. Caepio the censor (cos. 141), identical with the Cn. Caepio Cn. f. attested as quaestor in Macedonia province by an inscription from Thessalonica (IG X,2 1 135, with the ethnic ΡΩΜΑΙΩΝ). He rightly insisted (p. 234) that the presence of the ethnic fixes this dedication to the 2nd century or first decade of the 1st century BC 9.Much of Münzer's reconstruction was accepted by T. P. Wiseman 10, who adjusted things according to Degrassi's edition of the fasti Capitolini regarding the filiation of the consul 106, making the quaestor Cn. Caepio Cn. f. his elder brother 11. Accordingly Münzer's date for the quaestura and

9 See also n. 2 above.

10 Chapter 12, “The Last of the Metelli”, in Cinna the Poet and other Roman Essays (Leicester UP, 1974), at p. 181.

11 Cf. p. 4 and n. 5 above.

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shipwreck (c.105 BC) were moved much closer to the putative father's late career censura in 125-4. The Münzer/Wiseman thesis is well constructed ; premature death at sea as quaestor in his late twenties explains why the elder brother of the cos. 106 failed to hold a consulate or produce a male line posterity, permitting the further supposition that Cicero identified the shipwreck victim by his daughter because (according to that reconstruction) she was his only child. That makes good sense. On the other hand it remains supposition rather than actual evidence. The present reconstruction questions this conjoining of the quaestura and shipwreck, since the evidence only attests their geographic and epochal association. In doing so it supplies Servilia Claudi with at leastone brother who survived long enough to produce children of his own. There may have been other (perhaps personal) reasons for Cicero to refer to the shipwrecked Cn. Caepio via his daughter. In the present reconstruction, for example, she would be Cicero's coeval (aequalis in the language of his Brutus monograph on Roman orators). We remain ignorant of a great many social intricacies ofthe time and in consequence ought to be wary of pressing inference and deduction from real evidence too far, as though evidence itself. The supposition that Cn. Caepio father of Servilia Claudi perished at sea as a senator a decade or more after his Macedonian quaestura does not lack attested parallels. In the same epoch the noted novus homo C. Billienus served in the eastern provinces at least thrice in three different documented capacities 12. Billienus' legatio may even have been performed as a senior colleague ofCn. Caepio the vir quaestorius, if a somewhat overlooked interruption of the regular run of Macedonia province commanders is taken into account. A group of legati, presumably an authoritative board of ten, were given a somewhat experimental oversight of that province c.98-94 BC 13. Such a mission could have involved shipwreck and premature death in the Aegaean about 97, while his homonymous father predeceasing him by a year or so, at home in Italy in about his mid sixties, would have been an entirely unremarkable fate. Once it is accepted that the Aquillian legate Q. Caepio Cn. f. did not belong to the main line of the house, his filiation requires the existence of two Cn. Caepiones in the cadet line, his father and brother (born c.180s and late 160s BC respectively). Thus it becomes possible to maintain Münzer's

12 That is as quaestor (iDélos 1632), legate (iDélos 1710), and proconsul (iDélos 1854). This service spans the last twodecades of the second century, possibly into the 90s BC if his eastern legatio post-dated his provincial command. Also observe that the ethnic ΡΩΜΑΙΩΝ is attached to his title of rank in all three of these inscriptions.

13 To be argued in ch. IX, Argentum Macedonicum, of a work still in preparation. Cic. prov.cons. 5 attests a time (undated) before 56 BC when Macedonia was administered “sine imperio per legatos”. Most plausibly these legati were those initially appointed to supervise the integration into Macedonia province of the Caenic Chersonnese, and other Thracian lands about Byzantium overrun by T. Didius in 100 BC (the sort of duty customarily assigned to a board of ten). This abnormal extended administration by legates without command rights appears to have been planned to implement an experimental policy of economic favouritism (in a word, bribery) in order to induce Thracian warlords to more pacific relations with the Roman order following the severe fighting of the previous two decades. The chief remaining evidence for this policy innovation is the isolated monetary experiment of imitation Thasian tetradrachms and biscript-legend ΜΑΚΕΔΟΝΩΝ / AESILLAS Q tetradrachms, minted on a significant scale in Macedonia.

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identification of the quaestor in the Thessalonica titulus with Cn. Caepio the father of Servilia Claudi, but transfer him to the hitherto overlooked cadet line. The absence of an elder brother of the consul 106 from the consular fasti, or any other record, may readily be attributed to early deathin childhood or teen years ; a common enough fate in antiquity. It is also possible to find traces of the career of the Aquillian legate's elder brother Gnaeus (born c.late 160s). Between his accounts ofthe murder of Tiberius Gracchus and the operations of the consul L. Piso Frugi in the bellum

servile in Sicily (both 133 BC), Orosius provides rare and fleeting details of other slave uprisings in Latium and Campania, Attica and Delos, said to have derived from the large scale rebellion in Sicilyafter the manner of an infection (V, 9.4-5) :

Orta praeterea in Sicilia belli servilis contagio multas late infecit provincias. Nam et Minturnis CCCCL servi in crucem acti et Sinuessae ad quattuor milia servorum a Q. Metello et Cn. Servilio C<a>epione oppressa sunt. In metallis quoque Atheniensium idem tumultus servilis ab Heraclito praetore discussus est ; apud Delon etiam servi novo motu intumescentes oppidanis praevenientibus oppressi sunt ; absque illo primo Siciliensis mali fomite a quo istae velut scintillaeemicantes diversa haec incendia seminarunt.

Since hitherto the Servilii Caepiones of this epoch were all attributed to the main line descendedfrom the consul of 169 BC, and since Metellus and Caepio in Orosius' text must have held some form of military command (and therefore senatorial rank) in or shortly before 133 BC, the generation of Q. Caepio consul 106 was excluded and the two commanders identified with the senior consulars Metellus Macedonicus (cos. 143) and Cn. Caepio the censor (cos. 141) 14. That is possible, but better avoided as incompatible with the normal Roman response to slave uprisings in Italy 15. This was low-key and reflected a well documented prejudice of the ruling class that regarded slave wars as a grubby business, beneath the dignity of viri consulares to direct, and unworthy of a triumph when concluded, regardless of its magnitude. This reluctance to commit large armies and the most experienced commanders contributed more than once to the escalation of such conflicts. Even in the case of the famous rebellion led by the captive Thracian warlord Spartacus, following his defeat of both consuls in 72 BC the second big army assigned to the increasingly urgent task of suppression was given to the vir praetorius M. Licinius Crassus rather than any of the available consulars 16. Accordingly it seems difficult to accept that in the year of the

14 Missing from MRR I, but see MRR III, 39 and p. 194, citing Badian Studies 37 (a 1964 reprint of his 1957 paper in the Historia journal, “Caepio and Norbanus”). In her 2003 edition of Orosius (vol. ii, p. 103 n. 2) Mme. Arnaud-Lindet follows those identifications, commenting “sans doute”.

15 Cf. Livy XXXII, 26 on the role of the urban praetor fighting the revolt of 198 BC in Latium ; XXXIII, 36 on the 196BC outbreak in Tuscany, put down by the praetor peregrinus.

16 Such as the vir militaris P. Servilius Vatia (cos. 79), with two triumphs to his credit in a long and distinguished career, most recently in 74 BC, the year before the beginnings of Spartacus' war.

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Gracchan tribunate, which riveted the attention of the ruling princes to the urbs, two of them should have undertaken field commands for the suppression of uprisings in Campania involving some 4 - 5,000 slaves. This looks more like the responsibility of the urban praetor and/or his legates with delegated command rights 17. No doubt the identification of Orosius' Cn. Caepio with the censor (cos. 141) determined the equation of his Q. Metellus with the famous Macedonicus. Likewise if Caepio is reinterpreted a vir quaestorius and junior senator (q. c.138, adlected to the Senate by the censors of 136), his colleague Metellus ought to be Macedonicus' homonymous eldestson, Baliaricus (mint magistrate c.131, aedilis 129, cos. 123, born 166 or a little earlier), and both as legates of the urban praetor, or else of the consul in Rome that year, P. Mucius Scaevola. Attempts to identify the husband of Servilia Claudi invariably focus on the junior line of Claudii Pulchri, descended from Appius the salius (cos. 143). However nothing precludes the senior line descended from the salius' homonymous uncle Appius (cos. 185), which probably produced Livia Drusilla. An Appius plausibly attributed to the senior family in the right generation to wed Servilia Claudi is the military tribune who commanded the Janiculum defences of the urbs during Cinna's siege of Rome in 87 BC. After Marius reminded him of an earlier beneficium, he admitted Marius into the city through a gate in his sector. This was shortly before the chance death of Pompeius Strabo in a lightning storm (Appian R.Em. 1, 68). Cicero's concise identification of Servilia Claudi suggests an enduring marriage, perhaps only the one. But those briefest terms were surely enough for Atticus to understand whom 18. The significant beneficium that the ancient Marius thought appropriate to influence a youthful tribune may concern military service during the bellum

Italicum, but most suitably, or perhaps additionally, the salvation of his whole family during the lynchings of September 100, when Appius the tr.mil. 87 was no doubt very young indeed. Old enough, however, to remember the invasion of his home where the praetor Servilius Glaucia was hiding when dragged out and murdered (Oros. V, 17.9, quoted above). The Claudius who put himself, and his family, at risk attempting to save his friend should be the dicax Appius still alive in91 BC when he was remembered as a friend of the similarly witty Glaucia (Cic. de Or. II, 246, 249 ; Brut. 130). Probably son of the elder statesman Appius Claudius cos.suff. 130 (who took part in the heated debate over the lex Thoria agraria in 111 BC), and a mint magistrate c.109 BC (RRC 299/1 denarius legend signatures of three moneyers include AP·CL). That office and date suit a near coeval of Servilius Glaucia (born c.145/42).

17 Badian (Studies, 37) calls it “a serious slave revolt”. The numbers belie that. Even allowing that Gracchan agitators like Blossius of Cumae might have been suspected of involvement, there was no precedent for the appointment of a vir consularis to suppress an incipient slave rebellion, let alone two of them.

18 Atticus was in Rome or Italy during the bellum Octavianum. His family had Marian connections (through the Aniciiof Praeneste and P. Sulpicius tr. pl. 88). He left Rome to live in Athens during Sulla's stay there in 84 BC (Cornelius Nepos, Atticus 2), probably after Cinna's assassination at Ancona.

10Servilia Catuli femina primaria, and her daughter Lutatia Hortensi

In 70 BC the mother-in-law of the great orator Q. Hortensius Hortalus was a Servilia to whom Cicero accorded the honorific femina primaria ; an eminent woman with guest-friends among the Sicilian nobility wronged by Verres (Verr. II, 2.24). By Sept. 91 (dramatic date of Cicero's de Oratore) Hortensius was son-in-law of Q. Catulus the cos. 102 19. Thus so long as Catulus' daughterLutatia was still Hortensius' wife in 70 BC, Lutatia was daughter of Servilia the femina primaria 20. We are unusually well informed about the marriages of Q. Catulus pater (cos. 102). Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus (cos. 96) was avunculus of Catulus Capitolinus (cos. 78, born c.125) 21. Therefore Capitolinus' mother was a noble Domitia (born c.141), first wife of Catulus pater (born 149). Domitia must have been divorced, or died young, in the 110s to make room for the next, Servilian, wife. Lutatia the daughter of this second marriage should have been born by 105 BC (to have wed Hortensius by 91), and on the supposition that Hortensius was Lutatia's first husband, the Catulan-Servilian marriage may be dated c.110, with Lutatia born c.108. Since Hortensius was born in 114, they were wed c.93/2, the same period as the politically crucial marriage of Marius' sonto L. Crassus orator's daughter. By the time of the elder Catulus' death at the end of 87 BC his wife was reportedly a Claudia 22.There is no evidence for the occasion of this third marriage, nor the specific identity of Claudia's family, which may have been any of the senatorial plebeian Claudian families like the Marcelli or Aselli, or either of the surviving patrician houses of the Pulchri and Nerones (the Centones seemto have died out by this time). A patrician Claudia is perhaps more likely because Marcellan womentended to be called Clodia by this time 23. There is another connection between Domitia Catuli and Servilia Catuli, if the latter belonged to the cadet line of Servilii Caepiones, in the common service of the Aquillian legates Cn. Domitius and Q. Caepio in Asia province, described above. It is also likely that the marriage of Cn. Caepio's daughter Servilia to a Claudius attests the merging of the Servilian and Claudian families which provided Catulus pater's second and third wives. Since

19 Also his “comrade” in some religious or social club (de Or. III, 228 : sodalis). Perhaps both were Luperci, or fellowsin the college of poets, where the president was Catulus' uterine brother L. Iulius Caesar (cos. 90).

20 Hortensius' other known marriage, the notorious wife-loaning arrangement made with the bride's father L. Philippus (cos. 56) and current husband M. Cato (pr. 54), took place around 55 BC, with the chief purpose of providing an alternative heir to his (then) only son Quintus, after the latter unexpectedly turned Caesarian. It was thus carefully, and politically, planned that the intended new heir would be closely related (by uterine fraternity) with Cato's children by Marcia of the Philippi. Date and circumstances combine to indicate that the orator's first marriage was a long one which seems to have ended with Lutatia's death close to 60 BC. Accordingly it is likely that Lutatia was still his wife a decade earlier.

21 Fragment of Cicero's pro Cornelio, at Ascon. 86-87G = 79-80C.

22 Schol. Berne., p. 62 (ed. Usener) on Lucan. II, 173.

23 Similarly Cn. Lentulus (cos. 72), upon adoption into the patrician status of the Cornelii Lentuli from a plebeian Claudian family (probably a Marcellus by birth), appended to his name the agnomen adoptivum Clodianus. Contrast Livia Drusilla's father, born a patrician Claudius and appending Claudianus upon adoption into the plebeian house ofLivii Drusi.

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Servilia was still alive in 70 BC her Catulan marriage evidently ended in divorce. But nothing is known of circumstances or date, nor why Catulus preferred a Claudia from the same group of alliedfamilies. The much-married daughters of Q. Caepio consul 106 became his heirs after his loss of citizenship (104 BC) and his son's death (90), and were traduced as whores by Timagenes of Alexandria 24. If Catulus' Servilia were one of these sisters he might have unloaded her in 104, bothfor adultery and to avoid the infamy attaching to the father's name in the wake of the catastrophe atOrange. That should have improved his chances of election to a consulate after three successive repulsae (in 107, 106 and 105). But it is a difficult to reconcile Cicero's femina primaria honorific with Timagenes' characterization of the Servilian sisters, even allowing for some exaggeration in both sources. Furthermore if Servilia belonged to the less eminent cadet line of the Caepiones, sheshould have become more important to Catulus precisely from 104 when Marius' string of consulates began, owing to the Caesarian connections of that line argued here. Certainly Catulus as finally elected consul in 103 (for 102) and, following the three successive earlier repulsae,presumably needed Marian backing to secure this belated success. Especially since the number of good rival candidates only increased once Marius began to hog the chief office. Catulus' successor as Marius' consular colleague, Manius Aquillius filius, also recalls the earlier connection of the elder Manius Aquillius and his legate Q. Caepio. Legates could be nominated by the Senate in exceptional circumstances. However they were generally the commander's choice, made from among the most active and capable viri militares or personal and family friends. Overall it looks likely that Catulus' Servilian marriage was in the cadet line of Caepiones and belatedly assisted him to the consulate he found so elusive. Perhaps he divorced her in the wake of the Saturnine seditions and murders of 100 BC, owing to her family's intimate connections withthe radicals suppressed by the government forces 25, and wed Claudia from the same group of families because he wished to maintain an alignment which had served his career ambitions well. Certainly he took Marius' side in the fighting within the urbs in Sept. 100 (Cic. Rab. perd. 21), and perhaps assisted the consul in saving Appius Claudius the dicax from the lynching which overtook his friend Servilius Glaucia. However Catulus Capitolinus and Lutatia Hortensi are his only known children, and no further information which might help to determine the date and causes of his Claudian marriage (and the end of the Servilian) appears to be forthcoming. An alternative possibility is that Servilia femina primaria remained Catulus pater's wife until his death, and that the scholium on Lucan was mistaken about his wife at the time. Such an error may have arisen from associations like Catulus' adfinitas with Appius Claudius the military tribune who opened the city gate for Marius (husband of his wife's niece), or because Claudia was really the wife of his son.

24 As cited by Strabo (Geogr. 4, 1.13 = Timagenes F11 ed. Jacoby, FGrH 88), who describes them collectively with an accusative noun in the plural case, παῖδας, not the dual.

25 In the present reconstruction Servilia was first cousin (soror consobrina) of both Saturninus and his elder frater Cn.Dolabella, both slain in Sept. 100.

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Catulus Capitolinus probably first married c.100 BC, but none of his wives are on record. He seemsto have had at least two, one late in life bearing the daughter, Lutatia Mummi, through whom the emperor Servius Galba could include Catulus Capitolinus in his lineage (Suet. Galba 2-3).

Three Delian dedications and the last three generations of Caepiones

Lutatia and Hortensius the orator had at least two children who survived to adulthood and some eminence in public life. One known son, Q. Hortensius Hortalus filius, the poet friend of Valerius Catullus in his youth26. He turned Caesarian in about winter 56-55 BC (to the disgust of his neotericpals and his own father) and was later appointed Caesar's man in the important Macedonian command shortly before the assassination, probably after a praetura in 45. He should have been born around 85 BC (a few years earlier than Catullus, vixit c.82-52).Hortensia Q. f. the oratrix was no doubt their child too, and certainly daughter of Q. Hortensius theorator (Val.Max. VIII, 3.3, Quintilian I, 1.6). She made a name for herself as spokeswoman for the wealthiest ladies of Rome to the Caesarian Party Triumvirs during their proscriptions, delivering a famous speech which endured in written form (Val.Max. VIII, 3.3; Quintilian I, 1.6; Appian R.Em. 4, 32-34). Her birthdate belongs anywhere, within reason, after her parents' marriage c.93/2 BC. In view of the gap between that marriage and the son's birth, she was probably the eldest child, born c.91 and nearing fifty when she delivered her public speech in January 42. Her marriage to a Servilius Caepio is indicated by a Delian inscription in which her brother Q. Hortensius Q. f. is honoured as uncle of a Caepio, owing to the latter's benefactions (euergesiai) to the Athenians (iDélos 1622 = ILS 9460) :

Ο ΔΗΜΟΣ Ο ΑΘΗΝΑΙΩΝ ΚΑΙ ΟΙ ΤΗΝ ΝΗΣΟΝ ΟΙΚΟΥΝΤΕΣΚΟΙΝΤΟΝ ΟΡΤΗΣΙΟΝ ΚΟΙΝΤΟΥ ΥΙΟΝ ΤΟΝ ΘΕΙΟΝ ΚΑΙΠΙΩ-ΝΟΣ ΔΙΑ ΤΑΣ ΕΞ ΑΥΤΟΥ ΚΑΙΠΙΩΝΟΣ ΕΙΣ ΤΗΝ ΠΟΛΙΝ ΕΥ-ΕΡΓΕΣΙΑΣ. ΑΠΟΛΛΩΝΙ

Münzer devoted considerable space (RA 1920/1999, 313-18) to assessing the relationship between Caepio and Q. Hortensius filius attested by this titulus, illustrating four permutations (Tables 23-26) before incorporating the fourth into his Table 27 stemma “The Ancestors of Brutus” (p. 318). These variations were all circumscribed by his presumption that Caepio of the inscription was Marcus Brutus. The latter's new formal nomenclature Q. Caepio Brutus was already in use by summer 59 BC 27. In Münzer's view it resulted from a plenary adoption by the maternal uncle Q. Caepio. He reasoned that Q. Hortensius filius' sister Hortensia should have been the adoptor's wife,so that by the legal force of the adoption Caepio Brutus became son of the (putative) wife Hortensia

26 Addressed as Ortale, friend and recipient of the carmina Battiadae, in poem 65.

27 Cic. ad Att. II, 24.2 : Q. Caepio hic Brutus.

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and so nephew of her brother Hortensius. For several reasons this won't do. The assumption that the simple Caepio name of iDélos 1622 must be Caepio Brutus is dubious. Nothing prevented the stone-cutter using the Caepio Brutus formula found in other tituli honouring the tyrannicide 28. If a choice were to be made, for brevity's sake, between Caepio and Brutus, the latter name should probably have prevailed. Furthermore, Brutus appears to have been an only son, and it is far from certain that it would have been permitted to take him from his birth family and their rites in order to continue those of another. More solidly still, Brutus' Servilian uncle died young around the quaestorian age (early thirties) in 67 BC, still well capable of producing his own children and according to custom too young to either seek or receive permission from the college of pontiffs to make an adoption 29. For these reasons, and because the tyrannicide continued to be known by his birth names, Marcus Brutus, it is clear that he was not Caepio's adopted son but his principal heir in a testament which imposed the condicio nominis ferendi. This changes Brutus' relationship to his uncle's (unknown) wife fundamentally from the situation imagined by Münzer. He never became Caepio's son in the full legal sense (involving change of status and tribe), and only became the heir after Caepio's marriage had been terminated by his death. More likely iDélos 1622 does not concern Caepio Brutus nor the main line of Servilii Caepiones (his uncle's), but instead a Caepio of the cadet branch who was son of Hortensia oratorix and thus nephew of her brother Q. Hortensius Q. f. in the normal fashion. It would appear that Hortensia the oratrix (born c.91) wed her Caepio around 77 BC at a normal age for an aristocratic girl's first marriage, and that their son was the Servilius Caepio engaged to Caesar's daughter Iulia in early 59 BC before the arrangement was suddenly cancelled and Iulia given to Pompeius Magnus in early calendar Maius 30. This Caepio was presumably the Caepio mentioned by Cicero, along with M. Antonius, as creditors of his brother Q. Cicero during the latter's Asian command ; a debt paid out by Cicero in Rome in 59 from funds remitted to him by the Treasury in the brother's name 31. Cicero's inclusion of Antonius' forename here (evidently to distinguish him from his two younger brothers) and omission of Caepio's indicates the

28 E.g. IG VII, 383 (Oropos), where the name is complete. In another from Athens (SEG 17, 75 = AE 1959, 248) [Καιπιωνα] is a modern restoration, the filiation son of Quintus extant, and the name concludes ΒΡΟΥΤΟΝ.

29 Cf. Cic. dom.sua 34-37 on the strict rules that were applied. The age of the potential adoptor was an important issueand it seems that he was normally a senex (55 or older). While there are a few attested cases of adoption by men below the age of senectus, there doesn't appear to be even one adulescens adoptor (younger than 37) on record, apart from the Clodian farce Cicero ridicules in such informative detail, when the adoptor was younger than the filius adoptivus. Presumably a minimum of full adult maturity was normally required. Indeed it seems very likely that the novelty of the testamentary name-bearing stipulation was devised (in the early 2nd century BC) to satisfy childless aristocratic adulescentes excluded by custom from adopting. Brutus' uncle, the last male in the senior linesof Caepiones, was no Publius Clodius type radical prone to flout mos maiorum, but a conservative like his uterine brother Cato, and on the rise as a potential prince of the optimates when he died prematurely (cf. Cic. de Fin. III, 8).

30 Before 10 Maius – Cic. ad Att. II, 17.1.

31 Ad QF I, 3.7 (Id. Iun. 58[R], Thessalonica).

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impossibility of confusing the latter with any other man in Cicero's present frame of mind, still morbidly obsessed with the personal disaster of his exile and those responsible for it. In the following paragraph he mentions Hortensius the orator as a potential creditor of his brother (bracketed with Crassus and Calidius), while emphasizing the treachery of Hortensius, and of Crassus' man Q. Arrius, towards him in the unfolding of Clodius' plot to have him exiled. I.e. according to Münzer's reconstruction the potential creditor in 58 BC was father-in-law of the former creditor whom Cicero had paid out a year or so earlier. However, significant problems remain with this intepretation of the relationships attested by iDélos 1622. The birth and marriage dates of his putative mother Hortensia the oratrix requires thatthe Caepio engaged to Caesar's daughter by early 59 BC was hardly older than 16 or 17 at the time. This is unusually early in life for a Roman male to marry, though not impossibly so32. A much moreserious objection is the political activism in Caesar's cause in early 59 by his intended son-in-law, opposing the other consul Marcus Bibulus. This is mentioned in Suetonius' Caesar biography (Div.Iul. 21) :Around the same time he took to wife Calpurnia daughter of the Lucius Piso who was going to succeed him in the consulate, and arranged his own Iulia for Gnaeus Pompeius after repudiating her earlier betrothed, Servilius Caepio, by whose really outstanding efforts he had assailed Bibulusshortly before.

These events also appear in Appian (R.Em. 2, 14 : Caepio), Cassius Dio (38, 9.1, not named) and Plutarch (Pomp. 47 : Caepio). None of these authors provide a forename. Plutarch says that Caepio was due to marry Iulia a matter of days before she was suddenly wed to Pompeius. In this version Pompeius attempts to mollify the insulted and angry Caepio by promising him his own daughter instead, although she had already been engaged to Sulla's son Faustus. Plutarch's Caesar biography has much the same information (§ 14 : Servilius Caepio), only this time Caesar offers to arrange for him to marry Pompeius' daughter. This is more plausible. Binding Sulla's children, and their wealth and dependents, to his own house was one of Pompeius' most cherished and enduring political projects. He engaged his daughter to Faustus shortly after her birth in 67 BC and was never going to upset that arrangement. Though he may have lied for the momentary advantage. However that may be, the Faustus marriage went ahead when Pompeia turned fourteen or fifteen (53 or 52 BC). Caepio appears to have sought a new bride from the Fannii, one of the families staunchly opposed to the novel Gang of Three political combination, and married her later the same year, or perhaps the next. The fact of the original engagement is one example among many of the persistent preference forintra marriage among patrician houses. Caesar's choice of young Caepio for his son-in-law may

32 As shown by Caesar's first marriage to Cinna's daughter in 86/5 BC, or Scipio Africanus' teen marriage to a daughter of Aemilius Paullus in 219/18 BC.

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also have been influenced by existing propinquitas, if the theoretical (unattested) marriage of Caesar's cousin Grania to the vir quaestorius Cn. Caepio included in the present reconstruction, is correct. But there remains the serious difficulty of accomodating Suetonius' testimony of Caepio's effective political activity on Caesar's behalf with a teenage son-in-law. While he need not be a senator to make trouble for a consul, he should at least have been an effective orator with some experience under his belt in the adversarial argy-bargy of the forum Romanum. There is an alternative suggested by two other Delian inscriptions which probably belong to the same time as iDélos 1622 and the euergesiai of Caepio the benefactor of Athens and nephew of Q. Hortensius filius. The first of these gives thanks to the later conspirator Fannius Caepio, in what must have been his earliest youth, for minor assistance to the gymnasium at Delos (iDélos 1623):

Ο ΔΗΜΟΣ Ο ΑΘΗΝΑΙΩΝ ΚΑΙΟΙ ΤΗΝ ΝΗΣΟΝ ΟΙΚΟΥΝΤΕΣΚΑΙ ΟΙ ΑΛΕΙΦΟΜΕΝΟΙ ΓΑ[ι]- hoi aleiphomenoi - the athletes (lit. those being anointed ΟΝ ΦΑΝ[ν]ΙΟ[ν Γ]ΑΙΟΥ ΥΙΟΝ [Και]- with oil)ΠΙΩ[να] ΠΡΟΝΟΗΘΕΝΤ[α] ΤΟΥΑΛΙΜΜΑΤΟΣ

Fannius Caepio was still a young man (iuvenis or adulescens in Roman parlance) at the time of his conspiracy in 22 BC (Dio 54, 3.7), which means under 37, and so born in or after 58. Thus he cannot have been older than sixteen when this dedication was made in 42 BC, though the gymnasium context would still be appropriate for a Roman nobleman's son as young as fourteen. These converging items serve to fix his birthdate in 58/56 BC. Velleius Paterculus' notice of the conspiracy calls him first Fannius Caepio and then Caepio 33. In exactly the same way the rather different tradition represented by Cassius Dio's Greek text (54, 3) has Fannius Caepio first, then simply Caepio. The context of the simpler name here is the father's reward and punishment of the son's loyal and disloyal personal slaves after his execution. There is more detail on the loyal slave inMacrobius, where the conspirator is also plain Caepio and the father not named 34. This onomastic

33 II, 91.2 : Erant tamen qui hunc felicissimum statum odissent : quippe L. Murena et Fannius Caepio, diversis moribus (nam Murena sine hoc facinore potuit videri bonus, Caepio et ante hoc erat pessimus), cum inissent

occidendi Caesaris consilia , oppressi auctoritate publica , quod vi facere voluerunt, iure passi sunt. See also Velleius' formulation at II, 93.1 : circa Murenae Caepionisque coniurationis tempus.

34 Macrob. Sat. I, 11.21 (recounting stories of slaves who saved the lives of their masters) : Caepionem quoque qui in Augusti necem fuerat animatus, postquam detecto scelere damnatus est, servus ad Tiberim in cista detulit , pervectumque Ostiam inde in agrum Laurentem ad patris villam nocturno itinere perduxit . Cumis[?] deinde navigationis naufragio una expulsum dominum Neapoli dissimulanter occuluit, exceptusque a centurione nec pretio nec minis ut dominum proderet potuit adduci .

For Cumis deinde Robert Kaster's recent Loeb edition (LCL 510, 2011) prints Madvig's emendation “comes deinde”, noting in his apparatus criticus (p. 120 n. 59) that the four codices of his alpha group of mss. have cum isdem de, while the numerous codices of the beta group read cum (h)is deinde.

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pattern common to such diverse sources shows that he was a Servilius Caepio by birth who became heir of a C. Fannius and accepted a naming stipulation attached to the inheritance. The small group of family tituli from Delos in 42 BC probably includes a third text, unfortunately marred by a lacuna where the family name must have appeared (iDélos 1630) :

Ο ΔΗΜΟΣ Ο ΑΘΗΝΑΙΩΝ ΚΑΙ ΟΙ ΤΗΝ ΝΗΣΟΝ [οικουν]ΤΕΣ ΜΙΝΥΚΙΑΝ ΜΑΡΚΟΥ[Μινυκιου θυγα]ΤΕΡΑ ΜΗΤΕΡΑ ΔΕ ΚΟΙΝΤΟΥ[Καιπιωνος δια τα]Σ ΕΚ ΤΟΥ ΥΙΟΥ ΑΥΤΗΣ ΕΙ[ς][την πολιν ευερ]ΓΕΣΙ[ας][Απολλωνι Α]ΡΤΕΜΙΔΙ ΛΗΤΟΙ

The formula of Athenian dēmos and inhabitants of the island making this third dedication is common to iDélos 1622 and 1623, strongly suggestive that they belong to the same period. In iDélos 1622 and 1630 both Q. Hortensius and Minucia are honoured explicitly for benefactions done the Athenians by their nephew and son respectively, and we find another common formula expressing this : ΔΙΑ ΤΑΣ . . . ΕΙΣ ΤΗΝ ΠΟΛΙΝ ΕΥΕΡΓΕΣΙΑΣ.

Thirdly, the forename Quintus surviving on the iDélos 1630 stone is one of only two known to have been used by the Servilii Caepiones. For these converging reasons it is plausible to suppose that Caepio the benefactor of Athens in 43-42 BC was a Q. Servilius Caepio and son of Minucia M. f. rather than Hortensia oratrix. The most common and likely circumstance in which he could have been son of a Minucia and nephew of Q. Hortensius filius is that mother and uncle were uterine siblings. It would follow that Minucia was the eldest child of Lutatia Hortensi. This pushes back the latter's birthdate (from c.108) to about the same year as her famous husband (114 BC), removes the pressure on the birthdate of Q. Caepio the benefactor of Athens, and requires a reorganization that allows him the appropriate experience to have assailed Marcus Bibulus in spring 59 BC as a confident young orator in his early twenties. With Lutatia an approximate coeval of her second, Hortensian, husband she should have wed her first, M. Minucius, around 100 BC, and the birth of their daughter Minucia belongs shortlyafter. Minucia's son Q. Caepio, in turn, should then have been born some time 85/80 BC, so between twenty and twenty-six in 59 BC, the more normal age for a man's first marriage. Caesar's youthful contubernium with the Asia province commander M. Minucius Thermus in 81 BC springs to mind in this context (Suet. Div.Iul. 2). But Minucia perhaps more likely belonged to the Rufi, a granddaughter of M. Minucius Rufus (cos. 110) who achieved enough fighting Thracian and Celtic nations during a long Macedonian command (110-106 BC) to be awarded a triumph. Minucia's father, eldest son of the vir triumphalis, may be supposed to have died young in about themid 90s to make way for his young widow's Hortensian marriage shortly afterwards. Possibly he perished in the same shipwreck as Cn. Caepio the father of Servilia Claudi, around 97 BC.

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Cn. Caepio may be supposed to have served his quaestura under Minucius Rufus pro cos. in about 108, and returned to Macedonia a decade or so later as one of the legati governing the province in the circumstances mentioned above (p. 7, with n. 13). It would be appropriate enough if he were accompanied by his niece Lutatia's husband (from c.100 BC) the young M. Minucius Rufus, who as son of Caepio's former commander necessarily had paternal clientele interests in Macedonia and Greece. Such service together may also have led to an early marriage arrangement for their very young children which was eventually consummated, long after their premature deaths, in the mid to late 80s. It was not only magnates like Pompeius who were prepared to take the long view in the important matter of the merging of lineages and the property and political influence at their disposal. Besides, in the early 90s BC both Minucii Rufi and Servilii Caepiones were greater houses than the Clustumina tribe Pompeii.

Thus the three Delian dedications seem to document three generations of Servilii Caepiones in the cadet line :1. Caepio avus (born c.104 BC) the husband of Minucia M. f. (born c.99)2. their son Q. Caepio pater (born c.82), the betrothed of Caesar's Iulia and benefactor of Athens35

3. his son Caepio filius (born c.58/57), renamed Fannius Caepio in early 42 BC

The testator C. FanniusC. Fannius the pontifex, anti-Caesarian tribune in 59 and praetor 54/3 36, initially went to Sextus Pompeius in the Massaliotis in spring 43 BC as the junior member of a tresviral legation with L. Lepidus Paullus (cos. 50) and Q. Minucius Thermus (pr. c.56) 37. He remained with the Pompeian high command until shortly before Sextus' death (Appian R.Em. 5, 139), and so lived well beyond the date of iDélos 1623. Therefore the testator who made Fannius Caepio his principal heir with a condicio nominis ferendi ought to be the Fannius who served under Cassius at the siege of Rhodes in 43 BC (Appian R.Em. 4, 72). This is the appropriate and indeed necessary political alignment. He evidently died during the winter following the Rhodian operations, leaving Caepio filius his heir, aged about fourteen or fifteen. On the evidence of the inscriptions honouring his uncle Hortensius, mother Minucia and son Fannius Caepio, it appears that Q. Caepio pater was put in

35 For different views on the identification of Iulia's betrothed see the 1969 English version of the 6th edition of Matthias Gelzer's Caesar biography (Caesar : Politician and Statesman, p. 80 n. 1), MRR II, 149, and J. Geiger, “The Last Servilii Caepiones of the Republic”, AncSoc 4 (1973), 148.

36 Also the last Republican governor of Asia province (49-48 BC), where his cistophoric coinage legends attest his pontificate. Cf. G. R. Stumpf, Numismatische Studien zur Chronologie der römischen Statthalter in Kleinasien (122 v. Chr. - 163 n. Chr.) (Saarbrücker Studien zur Archäologie und Alten Geschichte, Bd. 4, 1991), pp. 35-40, and TafelII, 16-21.

37 Cic. Phil. XIII, 13, calling all three clarissimi viri, which shows that C. Fannius was the pontifex and vir praetorius.

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charge of Attica (perhaps all Achaia, based in Athens) in 43 when Brutus departed to join Cassius in Anatolia 38. If his estimated birthdate (c.82 BC) is correct, he may originally have gone east to Macedonia province as a legate to his uncle. The Athens posting would also explain his survival of the war (living beyond the execution of his son in 22 BC) in which so many friends and relatives perished, including M. Livius Drusus Claudianus, his cousin according to the present reconstruction.

Fannius Caepio the conspirator of 22 BCKnown chiefly as the instigator of a conspiracy to slay the self-styled Augustus in 22 BC (Dio 54, 3. 4), two decades after he first appears in iDélos 1623 with the formal nomenclature C. Fannius C. f. Caepio. Born 58/56 BC, as discussed above, he presumably went east with Brutus and Cassius in 44(along with other youngsters like M. Lucullus, born 62/1 BC), perhaps in the company of his putative uncle C. Fannius (M. f.). It is also possible that the mysterious [- - - ΣΕΡΟ]ΥΙΛΙΟΣ

ΚΑΙΠΙ[ΩΝ - - -] of a very fragmentary inscription from Thessalonica 39 refers to Fannius Caepio in 44/3 BC shortly before the death of Fannius and his name change upon acceptance of the latter's bequests. The same text seems to refer to his youth : [ - - - A]ΠΟ ΠΡΩΤΗΣ / [ΗΛΙΚΙΑΣ - - - ].Epigraphists date this document to the 2nd century CE, when the patrician Servilii Caepiones were long gone. So unless both gentilicium and cognomen were revived together by a provincial family under the Antonines, it ought to be the recutting of an old and damaged honorific. Fannius Caepio's plans to assassinate the self-Augustifier are said to have been supported by (unnamed) Roman lords upset by circumstances attending the trial and conviction of the retired commander of Macedonia province, Marcus Primus, an adherent of the ruler's son-in-law M. Marcellus of recent decease (in autumn 23 BC). Most of Caepio's following seems to have come from jurors at the trial, and those closest friends of Marcellus who had most to lose by his demise. This death was considered suspicious, the result of potions organized by Livia, perhaps acting in concert with Agrippa (in exile on Lesbos during Primus' Macedonian command). Dio is explicit (54, 3.4) that jurors at the Primus trial formed the plot at Caepio's instigation. By this time he had passed the minimum ages for membership in the Senate and even a Caesarian epoch consulate. We are told that his eminent supporters were sickened by revelations about the chargesconcocted against Primus, as by the Caesar's coercive appearance to give testimony against the

38 Although the Caesarian vanguard under Decidius and Norbanus overran Macedonia province and secured control of Thessaly (Appian R.Em. 4, 100), there is no evidence that Attica or the Peloponnese were lost to the liberation cause until after Philippi. On Athenian backing of the tyrannicides and their cause see, e.g., the 1997 English version of Christian Habicht's history of Hellenistic Athens (Athens from Alexander to Antony, pp. 357-360).

39 IG X,2 1 14, with better readings by W. Peek, Maia 23 (1973), 199, including confirmation of the cognomen. From the same city as IG X,2 1 135 (see above, p. 6) honouring the quaestor Cn. Caepio Cn. f., great-grandfather of Fannius Caepio according to the present reconstruction.

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defendant. This was apparently the motivation of the defence advocate Varro Murena, a régime man but with a short temper. Reportedly he was furious with the Caesar over the fact and style of his intervention. Besides Caepio the leader, Murena is the only conspirator named. His participat-ion was political dynamite owing to his intimacy with the top echelon of the régime : brother in some sense (apparently by adoption, propinquus by birth) of Maecenas' wife Terentia, who was alsothe Caesar's most regular girlfriend for twenty years or so from the triumviral period (when she was known as Terentilla) ; Livia Drusilla's only serious rival for his affections. No substantial details of the conspiracy nor the conspirators' actions survive, only several statements about their intention to slay the self-Augustifier (Velleius II, 91.2, Macrob. Sat. I, 11.21). The plot is said to have been divulged to the ruler in person by an informer named Castricius, in a context of the ruler's later and unique exhibition of gratitude to him40. Such details appear to confirm the authenticity of the plot, or at least the Caesar's fears in that regard. However they are compromised by the labelling of the conspiracy with Murena's name, seeing that the latter's role was secondary to Caepio's, and since the main source, which stresses Caepio's leadership, is also alone in stating openly (what was evidently a belief current at the time), that there may have been more fabrication than reality surrounding Murena's participation (Dio 54, 3.4). Court politics of the time, in the few years since Imp. Caesar's return from Spain, saw the rise in favour of the ruler's advisers Gaius Proculeius and his adfinis Maecenas, at the expense of Agrippa and Livia Drusilla. Livia appears to have delivered a bastard son by her lover Salvius of Ferentum while the Caesar was away41. Thus, besides all the variously mortifying personal issues involved in conjugal infidelity, brutally demonstrating that the ruling couple's ongoing failure to produce children was chiefly the self-Augustifier's problem. But events surrounding the Fannius Caepio conspiracy reversed this trend, Livia and Agrippa triumphing at the expense of their rivals. Since Varro Murena's personal relationships with Proculeius and Maecenas' wife were key to this dramatic reversal of fortunes, it is plausible enough that his involvement in what was essentially Fannius Caepio's plot was concocted by the two victors in malignant co-operation, then served up to the ruler through the informer Castricius. Less likely, though also possible, the entire conspiracy was a fabrication of those two dominant and most skillful courtiers from the start. The possibility that Caepio shared the blood of the Caesars in equal degree with Livia may lend credence to this view. The facts of the ruler's response, however, are that Fannius Caepio was singled out for a public show trial. All others seriously implicated, including Varro Murena, were convicted in absentia

40 Suet. Div.Aug. 56.4 : Unum omnino e reorum numero ac ne eum quidem nisi precibus eripuit, exorato coram iudicibus accusatore, Castricium, per quem de coniuratione Murenae cognoverat.

41 The convoluted, but substantial, evidence for this is discussed in detail in a study of Varrones Murenae and their lineages, still in preparation.

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without trial, and apparently kept in detention for a time before being quietly murdered (Dio 54, 3.5-6). This shows up the lie of Velleius' sycophantic Tiberian narrative that the conspirators suffered lawfully or justly the violence they had intented to commit (II, 91.2, text above in n. 33). The sympathy of Velleius' language towards Murena and contrasting stress on Caepio's awfulness (the superlative pessimus : really, really bad) shows clearly enough that Fannius Caepio was a spirited Republican who after Philippi remained hostile to the Caesarian Party and eventual monarchy. He may also have been pointedly critical of Livia in the intervening years. Her personal intimacy with Caesar's Volscian heir stood in stark contrast with her father's Republicanism and suicide when the cause of liberty was definitively lost. It certainly conforms with a personal antipathy that Livia's son Tiberius Nero formally prosecuted Caepio on the notoriously political charge of “diminishing the majesty”. This was no ordinary r le in a ȏ régime public career ; the suit marked Tiberius' début in public litigation (Suet. Tib. 8). Fannius Caepio didn't go quietly though, and for a moment appeared to have evaded the axes of the emerging fascist state. Whether exploiting the elements of public theatre, or the crowds, attendant upon such a show trial, he appears to have planned an escape in advance, successfully stowing away in a ship on the Tiber with the assistance of two personal servants. The daring trio sailed to Ostia and eventually made their way to the bay of luxury. But Caepio was caught by régime centurions at Naples and summarily executed. The ultimate destination in this plan would be interesting to know. Perhaps ancestral clients in Caria ; perhaps the newest and richest province, whence the first governor, Cornelius Gallus, had been tried and executed for treason only a few years earlier. But this detail has been lost. What should have been politic last rites to the drama were permitted to be performed by his father in Rome, where he publically punished the slave who had betrayed his son to the centurions, and freed the one who protected him to the end (Dio 54, 3.7). Self-Augustifier, however, could not restrain himself from the excess of ordaining formal supplicationes (days of thanksgiving) at the city temples for the suppression of the conspiracy, something remembered with hostility (Dio 54, 3.8)42. So Q. Caepio the young patrician engaged to Caesar's daughter, and possibly her propinquus, was apparently the last of the Servilii Caepiones. Had the arranged first marriage taken place, any resultant son should have become Caesar's principal heir, by direct line superiority to the Octavian,Pedian and Pinarian great-nephews. But it was not to be. Nothing is known of him after 22 BC when he turned about sixty, though it cannot be excluded that his son Fannius Caepio had a wife and children.

42 Traditionally decreed to mark significant public achievement, and especially military victories, this ugly degradationof public ceremony had first taken place a couple months after Imp. Caesar's birth, when the Senate voted thanksgiving for the suppression of Catilina's conspiracy.

21Cossinia Paula Caepionis (uxor)

An inscription records her dedication to “Hera Aphrodeite” at Akoris (mod. Tehna El Gebel) in Egypt on behalf of the emperor, on 7 Pharmouthi, year 15 of Tiberius Caesar, i.e. 29 March 29 CE (SEG 38, 1678, lines 4-5 : ΚΟΣΣΕΙΝΙΑ / ΠΑΥΛΑ ΚΑΙΠΙΩΝΟΣ). The unusual dual deity presumably corresponds to Egyptian Hathor, for whom Akoris (earlier known as Dehenet) was an important cult centre. Cossinia's husband need not have been a Servilius Caepio, but may have been. Nothing further seems to be known of either husband or wife43. The possibility should not be overlooked that she was the wife of Fannius Caepio. If his first wife, she had to have been in her seventies or even eighties in 29 CE, the year that the octogenarian Livia Drusilla died. Livia is included in this text as part of Tiberius Caesar's filiation : son of Sebastos and of Ioulia Sebaste.In the necessarily covert style of public political language in the monarchic epoch, this unusual filiation, which draws attention to the mother, may indicate that Cossinia made her dedication to celebrate the death of the evil empress whose son, the reigning emperor, had prosecuted her husband in the public show trial half a century earlier. The day of Livia's death seems to have escaped record, although some time early in 29 CE. Tacitus' obituary notice (Ann. V, 1-2) is the first item of that year.Curiously one of the rock tombs of Akoris was a place of refuge for Christians in the early years of persecution, while Cossinia's dedication was made around the same time as the crucifixion (Nisan, 29 CE).

M.K.P. Feb. 2012revised May 2015

43 Neither find mention in Syme's Augustan Aristocracy (1986)