Julia Drusilla - Biography

Biography

Drusilla was born in Abitarvium, modern day Koblenz, Germany. After the death of her father, Germanicus, she and her siblings were brought back to Rome by their mother, and raised with the help of their paternal grandmother, Antonia Minor. In AD 33, Drusilla was married to Lucius Cassius Longinus, a friend of the Emperor Tiberius. However, after Caligula became emperor in 37, he ordered their divorce and remarried his sister to his friend, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. During Caligula's illness in 37, he changed his will to name Drusilla his heir, making her the first woman to be named heir in an imperial will. This was likely an attempt to continue the Julio-Claudian line through any children she might have, leaving her husband to rule in the meantime. However, her brother recovered and in 38, Drusilla died, at the age of about twenty-two. Her brother went on to deify her, consecrating her with the title "Panthea" (all-goddess), and mourning her at her public funeral as though a widower.

Read more about this topic:  Julia Drusilla

Famous quotes containing the word biography:

    A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.
    André Maurois (1885–1967)

    In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.
    Richard Holmes (b. 1945)