Talk:Cornelia (wife of Caesar)

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Untitled

There are more problems with chronology: " in 83 BC [...] Cornelia was thirteen years of age" but "in 82 or 83 BC at the age of 11 or 12" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.128.201.62 (talk) 10:00, 15 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

deleted false statements; here's why

The article's chronology was very confused; it originally said Cornelia died 13 or 14 years before Caesar's quaestorship (which was in 69 or 68). I've deleted the 13 or 14 years; don't know whether that's correct for her death, but it corrects the quaestorship date.

The following explanation of Roman naming conventions for women is false:

"In keeping with the custom of the times, Cornelia had no name of her own as we would understand it. Daughters were given their father's name, with the designation major, minor, or the third to designate their birth rank: Majora, Minora, Tertia, and so on."

Of course Cornelia had a "name of her own," as much as any Roman male did — Roman prosopography is confusing for the very reason that in some sense men didn't have their "own" name either. (See, for instance, the potential confusion over the Lucii Valerii Flacci. I've seen this falsely feminist argument in many places — false, because it's just looking to express some kind of two-millennium-old resentment about the presumed erasure of identity, when in fact Romans took particular pride in carrying on their family names. They didn't think of names as markers of individual identity in the way that we do. So how do you know that the woman wasn't proud to bear her gens name, just as her brothers did? The bit about Maiora and Minora isn't wrong, but it's also true of men; we refer to Cato Maior and Cato Minor. If you want to work on feminist topics in ancient Rome, how about doing some serious reading about the lives of some of these amazing women? Fulvia, Cornelia Metella, and so many others of this period deserve better biographies than they currently have. Cynwolfe (talk) 20:54, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The dates for Cornelia's life.

Our information about Cornelia is actually very slight, and gives us only two reasonably secure dates. She married Caesar in the consulate following the death of his father in his sixteenth year (i.e. between his fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays), so 84 BC or 83 BC. She died shortly after Caesar's aunt Julia, but evidently before he departed to Spain as quaestor - so 69 BC.

It seems unlikely, though not impossible, that the marriage took place after the death of her father, so I have gone with 84 BC for the article.

I can find no evidence for her being twenty-six at the time of her death, so there is no firm reason for placing her date of birth at 94 BC. It could be this late, though that would make her very young at the time of her marriage. She is unlikely to have been older than Caesar, so her birth date was probably after 100 BC. A date c. 97 BC is perhaps most probably, but I have retained c. 94 in case the statement of her age at death is based on some evidence I have not been able to track down.

The date of the birth of Julia is also uncertain. The idea that it was c. 83 seems based on a reading of Suetonius, Divine Julius 1.1, that assumes that when he say that Julia was born 'after' Caesar and Cornelia married, that meant soon after. But Suetonius does not say 'soon', and if Julia was born this early, she would have been twenty-three or twenty-four when she married Pompey in 59 BC. This seems very old for a daughter of a leading Roman politician and aristocrat to be unmarried, and a later date of birth seems more likely. The Oxford Classical Dictionary say c. 73, which is possibly on the late side, but still plausible. I have therefore changed the date, and removed references to the age of Cornelia when she gave birth to Julia, and Julia's age on her mother's death.

There seems also to be no reliable evidence that Cornelia died in childbirth, though it is possible - I've removed that as well.

The Tacitus reference in the earlier draft was for Julia being Caesar's only daughter - it did not mention Cornelia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tony Keen2 (talk • contribs) 12:02, 27 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]