When Colleen McCullough wrote her Masters of Rome series, she was fortunate to have two women and contemporaries as her subjects who became the mothers of famous and/or notorious offspring: Aurelia Cotta (Gaius Julius Caeasar) and Livia Drusa (Servilia, Caesar's later long-time mistress, and Cato the Younger).
Due to ancient historical tradition, which largely ignored women, not much is really known about those two, thus McCullough had the fiction writer's liberty to create two captivating personalities out of just a few bare facts and writers' comments.
Aurelia Cotta (120 BC-54 BC) was the daughter of a Rutilia and the consul of 144, Lucius Aurelius Cotta. Rutilia is assumed to have been a sister of Publius Rutilius Rufus. After her husband's death, she married his brother, Gaius Aurelius Cotta, and as a result, Aurelia had three half-brothers, who later became consuls: Gaius Aurelius Cotta in 75 BC, Lucius Cotta in 74 BC and Marcus Cotta in 65 BC. Aurelia married Gaius Julius Caesar (the Elder), and her only son was the famous Gaius Julius Caesar. She also had two daughters, one of them the grandmother of Augustus.
Plutarch calls Aurelia a woman of discretion (Lives, Julius Caesar). Tacitus, in Dialog on Oratory: Book 1 [20], writes:
Thus it was, as tradition says, that the mothers of the Gracchi, of Cæsar, of Augustus, Cornelia, Aurelia, Atia, directed their children's education and reared the greatest of sons. The strictness of the discipline tended to form in each case a pure and virtuous nature which no vices could warp, and which would at once with the whole heart seize on every noble lesson.
Even less we know about the life of Livia Drusa (see Plutarch, Cato the Younger). She was the sister of the tribune of the plebs of 91, Marcus Livius Drusus (and also a niece of Publius Rutilius Rufus) and married Quintus Servilius Caepio, the son of another Quintus Servilius Caepio – he of the Gold of Tolosa (subject of a future post) and the lost Battle of Arausio. An offspring of that marriage was the famous/infamous Servilia, mother of Brutus and mistress of Caesar. Caepio later divorced Livia, and she married Marcus Porcius Cato Salonianus, and one of her children from this second marriage was, as he is known to us, Cato the Younger. Both Livia and Cato Salonianus died young, and the children came under the guardianship of her brother, but who soon thereafter was assassinated himself.
Aurelia must have had a rather boring though formidable personality, and McCullough tries to breathe more life into her, as a young landlady of a large insula, as one who has to become mother and father of her children during her husband's long absences, and later on through a rather murky but basically platonic relationship with Sulla.
Livia Drusa, in contrast, becomes a tragic figure, ignored, misunderstood, living in daydreams about Ulysses/Cato Salonianus; and when her dream unexpectedly becomes true, she has only a short life of happiness left.
JSTOR (limited access) has The Women of Caesar's Family and Cicero, Livy and Educated Roman Women.
