OCTAVIA, the youngest daughter of Caius Octavius, and the sister of Augustus. She was the widow of Caius Marcellus in 40 B.C., when her brother and Mark Antony concluded their recent variances by a formal treaty of agreement. Her marriage with the latter was then proposed as a means of still further strengthening the union between the two triumvirs. To save her country from
civil broils, and to please her brother, the noble-minded matron sacrificed herself, and wedded the notorious libertine. It soon appeared that along with her hand she had given her life's devotion. As long as Antony remained at home, her wisdom, her virtues, and the charms of her mature beauty, were zealously employed to keep him on good terms with Octavianus. When he deserted her in 36 B.C., for the syren charms of Cleopatra, her conjugal fidelity remained unabated. In the following year she set out for Egypt to endeavour to regain his vapid affections; on receiving at Athens an order from him to return home, she immediately obeyed; and it was not until, in 32 B.C., he sent her a bill of divorce, that she could be prevailed upon to leave his house in Rome. Even after his death in 30 B.C., she did not think that her obligations to serve him were at an end. She continued to bring up his younger son by his first wife Fulvia; and when his children by Cleopatra were brought to Rome to grace the triumph of Octavianus, she adopted them into her own family. Octavia had now for several years been constantly attended by misfortune; but the great and the closing sorrow of her life was yet to come. In 23 B.C. Marcellus, her son by her first husband, the idol of the Roman people, and the heir-presumptive to the empire, died at the age of twenty. She fell into a state of melancholy, which continued till her death in 11 B.C.
The great worth of Octavia was celebrated by a public interment, and by a funeral oration delivered by her imperial brother. Her memory was preserved by a magnificent edifice built by Augustus, and called "Porticus Octaviae."