Are they, and welcome to Emperors of Rome, a Roman history podcast from literary university.

I'm your host, Matt Smith, and with me today is Dr. Kaelin Davenport, Associate Professor

in Roman history at Macquarie University, and Humboldt Research Fellow at GERTHY University

in Frankfurt, Germany.

This is episode CLX, Faustina.

As the daughter of the previous emperor, Faustina provided her husband, Marcus Aurelius,

with his solid link to the Imperial throne.

Besides continuity, her time as emperors came to embody motherhood, not just to the

next emperor, but to the empire as a whole.

Here's Kaelin Davenport.

Faustina the younger is someone who was the daughter, the wife, and a mother of emperors,

so she was the daughter of Antares Pils, and then she married Marcus Aurelius, and then

she had 14 children, one of whom the only boy survived adulthood became the Emperor Commodus.

So she occupies a really important place in the Imperial family in the 2nd century AD.

So much like the previous emperors that I've talked about in the podcast, which is Sabina,

she is the Imperial link between the previous emperor and her husband.

Very much so, yes, Antares Pils had four children, two boys and two girls, but Faustina

was the only one still living when he became emperor, somewhat unexpectedly in 138.

So what do we know about her early life then?

Well, we really don't know how much about her early life before her father became emperor,

so she was born into a wealthy, sedentary family, so Antininus before he became emperor,

was a senator, governor of Asia.

...