Servilia

Born around 100 BC into the Servilii Caepiones, one of Rome's old families, Servilia was Cato the Younger's half-sister and married young to Marcus Junius Brutus, bearing a son before her husband died in 77 BC. She remarried Decimus Junius Silanus and had four more children, but the affair that defined her began around 59 BC, after Silanus's death: a relationship with Julius Caesar that Plutarch says became mutual obsession and was openly known in Rome. For years she occupied a rare seat at the centre of Republican intrigue, bound to Caesar by passion and to the old senatorial order by blood.…