Agrippina Minor - Birth and Early Life

Birth and Early Life

Agrippina was born at Oppidum Ubiorum, a Roman outpost on the Rhine River located in present day Cologne, Germany. As a small child, she travelled with her parents throughout the Empire until she and her siblings (apart from Caligula) returned to Rome to live with and be raised by Antonia. Her parents, in the meantime, journeyed to Syria to complete official duties. One year later in October, Germanicus died suddenly in Antioch (modern Antakya, Turkey).

Germanicus’ death in the year 19 caused much public grief in Rome, and gave rise to rumors that he had been murdered by Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso and Munatia Plancina on the orders of Tiberius, as his widow Agrippina the Elder returned to Rome with his ashes. Agrippina the Younger was thereafter supervised by her mother, her paternal grandmother Antonia Minor, and her great-grandmother, Livia, all of them notable, influential, and powerful figures from whom she learnt how to survive. She lived on the Palatine Hill in Rome. Her great-uncle Tiberius had already become emperor and the head of the family after the death of Augustus in 14.

Read more about this topic:  Agrippina Minor

Famous quotes containing the words birth and, birth, early and/or life:

    Not yet the thirtieth year, the thirtieth
    Station where time reverses his light heels
    To run both ways, and makes of forward back;
    Whose long co-ordinates are birth and death....
    Allen Tate (1899–1979)

    They do not live in the world,
    Are not in time and space.
    From birth to death hurled
    No word do they have, not one
    To plant a foot upon,
    Were never in any place.
    Edwin Muir (1887–1959)

    Two sleepy people by dawn’s early light, and two much in love to say goodnight.
    Frank Loesser (1910–1969)

    The great end of life is not knowledge, but action. What men need is as much knowledge as they can assimilate and organize into a basis for action; give them more and it may become injurious. One knows people who are as heavy and stupid from undigested learning as other are from over-fulness of meat and drink.
    Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)