Julia Drusilla (16 September 16–10 June 38) was the second daughter of Germanicus and Agrippina the Elder, as well as the sister of Empress Agrippina the Younger and emperor Caligula.
Biography[]
Julia Drusilla was born on 16 September 16 in Abitarvium, Germania (now the city of Koblenz, Germany), the second daughter and fifth child of Germanicus and Agrippina the Elder. She married consul Lucius Cassius Longinus, a friend of her adoptive great-uncle Tiberius, the Roman emperor, but she had an incestuous relationship with her brother Caligula for years; she was dissatisfied with her fat husband, who did not sexually please her.
Caligula wanted to marry her, as marrying siblings was allowed in Egypt, but it was illegal in Rome; even Drusilla accepted that fact. She was present at his side during his rise to power, including the coronation after his murder of Tiberius; she gave him an onion to sniff in order to give him crocodile tears when he mentioned Tiberius' death at his coronation. Drusilla would then persuade Caligula to have the Praetorian Guard prefect Naevius Sutorius Macro executed due to his murder of Tiberius, framing him for the murder.
Drusilla eventually convinced her brother to marry a priestess of the goddess Isis, as she was having a gathering with some of the priestesses; he would marry Milonia Caesonia, one of the priestesses that he met. Drusilla was opposed to this, as Caesonia had a terrible reputation, but she reluctantly allowed the marriage. Eventually, she grew mad at him due to his descent into madness, and she ran away after he slapped her after she called him an "amateur" for his decision to execute the innocent Tiberius Gemellus, his younger stepbrother.
In 38, she fell ill with the same fever that her husband had caught earlier that year, falling into the physician Charicles' arms as Caligula made a public display of his wife Caesonia giving birth to a daughter, Drusilla the Younger. Despite Caligula making a prayer to the goddess Isis, Julia Drusilla died of the fever, leading to Caligula destroying a statue of Isis and going on a rampage, but not before kissing all of the parts of her dead body.