Family
She was a daughter of Stilicho, magister militum of the Western Roman Empire, and Serena. Maria was a sister of Eucherius and Thermantia. "De Consulatu Stilichonis" by Claudian reports that her unnamed paternal grandfather was a cavalry officer under Valens, Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire. Orosius clarifies that her paternal grandfather was a Romanized Vandal. The fragmentary chronicle of John of Antioch, a 7th-century monk tentatively identified with John of the Sedre, Syrian Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch from 641 to 648 calls the grandfather a Scythian, probably following Late Antiquity practice to dub any people inhabiting the Pontic-Caspian steppe as "Scythians", regardless of their language. Jerome calls Stilicho a semibarbarian, which has been interpreted to mean that Maria's unnamed paternal grandmother was a Roman.
The poem "In Praise of Serena" by Claudian and the "Historia Nova" by Zosimus clarify that Maria's maternal grandfather was an elder Honorius, a brother to Theodosius I. Both were sons of Count Theodosius and Thermantia, as clarified in the "Historia Romana" by Paul the Deacon. Genealogists consider it likely that Maria was named after her maternal grandmother, tentatively giving said grandmother the name "Maria".
Read more about this topic: Maria (empress)
Famous quotes containing the word family:
“The same dreadful set,
the same family of orange and pink faces
carved and dressed up like puppets
who wait for their jaws to open and shut.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“It is turning three hundred years
On our cisatlantic shore
For family after family name.
We’ll make it three hundred more”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The son will run away from the family not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will fly not to seek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner from a tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a business, to enrich himself and to compete with his infamous papa.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–67)