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| HISTORY WEEK MEME | DAY 7: ONE QUOTE/WORD | 

↳ Veni, Vidi, Vici - Julius Caesar in 47 BCE

“In the same year, 40 B.C., Octavia, Octavian’s sister, lost her elderly husband, Gaius Claudius Marcellus, and, perhaps five years older than her brother, became a highly eligible widow (albeit with two daughters and an infant son). The proposition that the treaty should be sealed by their marriage was irresistible. [...]there was a benign precedent for such a union in the long-ago and extremely happy marriage between Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar’s daughter, Julia. As long as she lived the two warlords had stayed friends; history would now be given an opportunity to repeat itself.

Octavian’s short but dazzling political career had exposed a ruthlessness that overrode ordinary affection, but on this occasion we may guess that he sincerely wanted reconcilation with Antony. Plutarch records that he was “deeply attached to his sister, who was, as the saying is, a wonder of a woman.” He is unlikely to have handed her over into the hands of his unpredictable and womanizing colleague if he did not have his adoptive father’s example in mind.”