Neglected Children on the Ara Pacis

Abstract

The procession on the southern frieze of the Ara Pacis exhibits, after Antonia and Drusus, another couple. Identity is not in doubt: the elder Antonia and her husband L. Domitius Ahenobarbus (cos. 16 B. C.). They are equipped with two children. The girl looks ten or eleven, the boy about six. That robust boy has universally been held identical with Gnaeus, the future consul of A. D. 32 (husband of Agrippina and father to Nero). Strong reasons tell against. Both children, it appears, perished in the sequel. The enquiry brings in sundry members of the "domus Augusta." Finally, the elderly man with distinctive features who stands in the background to Ahenobarbus and his daughter is to be identified as Paullus Aemilius Lepidus (consul suffect in 34, censor in 22)—on the conjecture that the father of Ahenobarbus, Republican admiral and partisan of Marcus Antonius, had married his sister. That conjecture explains the subsequent emergence of the name "Domitia Lepida" (i.e., Nero's aunt).

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