Iunia Tertia

Iunia Tertia (* around 70 BC; † 22 AD) was a member of the ancient Roman plebeian dynasty of the Junians and the wife of the Caesar murderer Gaius Cassius Longinus .

Life

Iunia Tertia was a daughter of the consul from 62 BC. BC, Decimus Junius Silanus , and the Servilia . Her nickname Tertia means that she was the third daughter. One of her sisters, Iunia Secunda , was the wife of the later triumvir Marcus Aemilius Lepidus . Her older half-brother was Marcus Junius Brutus . She married Gaius Cassius Longinus, with which she had the two main conspirators in the murder of Gaius Julius Caesar as husband and half-brother. The speaker Marcus Tullius Cicero mentions Iunia Tertia in several letters to Brutus and Cassius as well as to his friend Titus Pomponius Atticus . In two places he calls her by her nickname Tertulla .

According to Suetonius , Cicero cracked a spiteful joke with the name of Junia Tertia about Caesar's love affair with her mother. When Caesar struck large goods for a relatively small purchase price at auction during the civil war in Servilia and this caused astonishment, Cicero scoffed that this deal was much better since Tertia had withdrawn. The speaker played with the double meaning of the Latin sentence " Tertia deducta est ", which on the one hand can mean that despite the low price an additional third was deducted as an estate, but on the other hand also: "The tertia has been given to him (Caesar)" . The latter meaning alluded to the rumor that the already older Servilia had offered her daughter Caesar as a lover.

The year of birth of a son of Cassius and Iunia Tertia is 58 BC at the latest. BC, since it was 44 BC. The toga virilis could put on. In May 44 BC Iunia Tertia suffered a miscarriage. When Cicero on June 8, 44 BC BC Brutus and Cassius in Antium and discussed with them how to proceed in view of the aggravated climate after Caesar's murder, Servilia and Iunia Tertia also took part in this discussion.

Iunia Tertia was very old and died at the age of 90, probably in AD 22, 64 years after the Battle of Philippi , in which her husband and half-brother lost their lives. She left her huge fortune to many nobles, but passed on to Emperor Tiberius . This nevertheless allowed her to have a splendid burial , which was designed as a celebration of the heroes of the fallen republic. Her corpse was accompanied to the Roman Forum by imaginary , wax masks of deserving deceased, from twenty famous and noble families, all of whom were related to her . Only the portraits of Brutus and Cassius were not allowed to be shown in the procession: As Tacitus remarked in a winged word, "they shone through their absence" .

literature

Friedrich Münzer : Iunia 206. In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume X, 1, Stuttgart 1918, column 1114.
Susan Treggiari: Servilia and her Family. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2019, ISBN 978-0-19-882934-8 , especially pp. 138–143 (overview of the relevant passages in the register on p. 353).

Remarks

↑ Tacitus , Annals 3.76; Plutarch , Brutus 7.1; Suetonius , Caesar 50.2; among others
↑ Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum 14,20,2 and 15,11,1.
↑ Suetonius, Caesar 50.2; Macrobius , Saturnalia 2.2.5; on this Joachim Brambach, Kleopatra , 1996, p. 74.
↑ Plutarch, Brutus 14.4.
↑ Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum 14,20,2.
↑ Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum 15.11.1.
↑ Tacitus, Annals 3.76.