Family & Imperial Lineage

Trajan — reigned as emperor after his own adoption by Nerva in 97. Expanded the empire to its largest territorial extent. On his deathbed in 117 (by tradition, with his wife Plotina managing the announcement), adopted his young kinsman and ward Hadrian as successor. Hadrian’s father was Trajan’s cousin, and Trajan became Hadrian’s guardian when he was orphaned at ten (Historia Augusta, Hadrian 1).

Hadrian — Trajan’s adopted heir. With his own health failing and no son, he first adopted Lucius Ceionius Commodus as heir in 136; when that man died in January 138, Hadrian adopted Antoninus Pius the following month — on the explicit condition that Antoninus adopt both his own nephew-by-marriage Marcus (then 16, later Marcus Aurelius) and the son of the first, deceased heir (later Lucius Verus).

Antoninus Pius — Hadrian’s adopted heir, and Marcus’s adoptive father under that same 138 arrangement. Married his daughter Faustina the Younger to Marcus in 145, tying the adoption to a marriage as well. Reigned 23 years, the longest of the five, largely without major wars.

Marcus Aurelius becomes emperor on Antoninus’s death, and immediately elevates his adoptive brother Lucius Verus to co-emperor — the first time the empire had two co-equal Augusti ruling jointly. See The World of Marcus Aurelius for the reign that follows.

Faustina the Younger — daughter of Antoninus Pius and Faustina the Elder, married to Marcus from 145 until her death in 175 or 176. She traveled with him on campaign, including to the Danube frontier and the East, and was given the title Mater Castrorum (“Mother of the Camp”). See her full entry in Names in the Text.

Marcus and Faustina had thirteen or fourteen children together, unusually well documented for a Roman family. Most died young. Two are historically consequential: Lucilla, married first to co-emperor Lucius Verus and later, after his death, to the general Tiberius Claudius Pompeianus — she was executed in 182 for conspiring to assassinate her own brother Commodus. And Commodus himself, the only son to survive to adulthood, who succeeded Marcus as sole emperor. A handful of other daughters (Fadilla, Cornificia, Vibia Aurelia Sabina among them) outlived their father as well.

Commodus (Marcus’s son, co-emperor from 177) — the first son to inherit the throne directly from his father in a century, breaking the adoptive pattern. His reign — twelve years as sole emperor, fifteen counting his co-emperorship from 177 — is remembered for erratic personal rule, including performing as a gladiator in the arena, and ended when he was strangled in his bath on the last night of 192 in a palace conspiracy involving his mistress and his own Praetorian prefect.

The “Year of the Five Emperors”: Pertinax is proclaimed emperor, then murdered by his own Praetorian Guard within three months; Didius Julianus buys the throne from the Guard at auction and is executed within weeks; Septimius Severus in Pannonia and Pescennius Niger in Syria are each declared emperor by their own armies, while Severus secures Clodius Albinus in Britain by naming him Caesar. Severus reaches Rome first and removes both rivals by force.

Septimius Severus — no blood relation to Marcus’s family at all, but Cassius Dio, describing the aftermath of his victory over Albinus in 197, records that he was constantly styling himself the son of Marcus and the brother of Commodus, and that he gave Commodus divine honours — a political fiction grafting the Severan dynasty onto the Antonine name.

Caracalla, jointly with his brother Geta from their father’s death — Severus’s actual sons. Caracalla had Geta murdered within the year, reportedly in their mother Julia Domna’s arms, and ruled alone until his own assassination in 217.