Antonia the Younger (36 BC–AD 37)

Daughter of Mark Antony and Octavia the Younger, Augustus’s sister. Wife of Drusus the Elder, Tiberius’s brother; after his death, as Josephus writes, she never remarried, although Augustus himself urged her to. Mother of Germanicus, Livilla and Claudius, and grandmother of Caligula, who grew up in her house. Her secretary was Caenis, later Vespasian’s companion. According to Dio, Antonia dictated to Caenis a secret letter to Tiberius about Sejanus; Josephus adds that the letter was carried to Capri by Pallas, her most faithful servant. Caligula heaped on his grandmother all the honours Livia had held, but later humiliated her. Suetonius writes that he hastened her death, and some suspected poison. She appears in the Vespasian episode, in the chapter “Money Doesn’t Stink”.