Life
His paternal grandfather was senator Sextus Quinctilius Varus. Varus was a patrician, born to an aristocratic but long-impoverished and unimportant family in the Quinctilia gens. His mother was a daughter from consul Gaius Claudius Marcellus Minor's first marriage. His father was Sextus Quinctilius Varus, a senator aligned with the conservative republicans in the civil war against Julius Caesar. Sextus survived their defeat, but it is unknown whether he was involved in Caesar's assassination. He committed suicide after the Battle of Philippi (42 BC).
Despite his father's political allegiances, Varus became a supporter of Caesar's heir, Octavian, later known as Augustus. About 14 BC he married Vipsania Marcella, the daughter of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa and Claudia Marcella Major and became a personal friend of both Agrippa and Augustus. Vipsania Marcella was a grandniece of Augustus. When Agrippa died, it was Varus who delivered the funeral eulogy. Thus, his political career was boosted and his cursus honorum finished as early as 13 BC, when he was elected consul junior partner of Tiberius, Augustus' stepson and future emperor.
Read more about this topic: Publius Quinctilius Varus
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men’s affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice. But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“To quarrel with the uncertainty that besets us in intellectual affairs would be about as reasonable as to object to live one’s life with due thought for the morrow because no man can be sure he will alive an hour hence.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)