Rome's first imperial family held power for about ninety-five years, from Augustus' settlement of 27 BC to the suicide of Nero in AD 68, and produced five emperors. The name is a splice: the Julii of Caesar and Augustus joined to the Claudii of Livia Drusilla and her sons. Adoption, not simple descent, shaped much of the sequence. Caesar had no legitimate son, so he named his great-nephew Octavian his heir in his will, and the accessions of Tiberius and Nero were likewise engineered by testament, marriage and legal fiction. Caligula came in as Tiberius' testamentary co-heir, and Claudius was acclaimed by the guard after Caligula's murder.
Augustus spent fifty years arranging his relatives like constitutional furniture. His sister Octavia the Younger was married to Mark Antony to seal an alliance that Cleopatra VII destroyed; his only child, Julia the Elder, born to the divorced Scribonia, was handed in turn to his nephew Marcellus, to his general Agrippa, and finally to his stepson Tiberius. Marcellus died at nineteen, Agrippa in 12 BC; Lucius Caesar died at Massilia in AD 2 and Gaius in Lycia in AD 4, from a wound taken in Armenia. Agrippa Postumus was adopted, disowned and killed the moment Augustus died. Tiberius, son of Livia by Tiberius Claudius Nero, inherited in AD 14 as the heir of last resort — after being forced to divorce Vipsania Agrippina, whom he never stopped mourning.
The Claudian branch then consumed itself. Tiberius' only surviving son, Drusus Julius Caesar — an earlier son by Julia had died in infancy — was poisoned in AD 23 by his wife Livilla in concert with the praetorian prefect Sejanus; his adopted son Germanicus, child of Nero Claudius Drusus and Antonia Minor, died at Antioch in AD 19 believing himself murdered. Germanicus' widow Agrippina the Elder starved to death in exile, her sons Nero and Drusus Caesar destroyed with her, leaving only Caligula, emperor in AD 37 and cut down by his own guard four years later. His uncle Claudius, hidden away as an invalid and thereby spared, ruled next — undone by his wives Messalina, executed in AD 48, and then his niece Agrippina the Younger, who set aside Britannicus for her own son Nero.
The tree as drawn here follows the ancient narrative sources — Tacitus' Annals, Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars and Cassius Dio — which is why so many of its lines are also accusations. Nero had Britannicus poisoned in AD 55, his mother killed in AD 59, his wife Claudia Octavia executed in AD 62, and Seneca the Younger, his tutor, ordered to open his veins in AD 65. When his infant daughter Claudia Augusta died at four months, the line had no future left; Nero's death in AD 68 ended it and opened the civil war of the four emperors. The dynasty endures as the founding case study in how absolute power behaves inside a single household.
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