Junia Calvina was aRomannoblewoman who lived in the 1st centuryAD.
The daughter ofAemilia Lepida andMarcus Junius Silanus Torquatus, consul in 19, Calvina belonged to twopatricianhouses: thegens Aemilia andgens Junia respectively. She was also thegreat-great-granddaughter of the Roman emperorCaesar Augustus on her mother's side of theImperial family. As such, she was alsorelated by blood to thegens Julia, thearistocratic family of the Roman dictatorJulius Caesar. Tacitus calls Calvina "festivissima puella" and the EmperorVespasian, in one of his jokes, mentions her as living in AD 79.[1] Seneca describes her as "most celebrated of all women (she whom all called Venus)."[2]
Calvina may have been married toGaius Sallustius Passienus Crispus and had a daughter named Sallustia Calvina with him, this woman marriedPublius Ostorius Scapula.[3]
Calvina wasmarried toLucius Vitellius, the brother ofAulus Vitellius, in the 1st century AD. Despite, or rather because of their blood relation to the first emperor ofRome, Calvina's close family was oftenpersecuted by theirkinsmen, particularly thelineal descendants ofLivia Drusilla, Augustus' third wife and the firstRoman empress. Calvina and Vitellius were divorced in AD 49 followingallegations ofincest with her younger brother,Lucius Junius Silanus Torquatus, who was forced to commit suicide shortly thereafter. In the same year, Calvina wasexiled from Rome by EmperorClaudius, only to be recalled a decade later by his successor,Nero.
With Nero's suicide in AD 68, theJulio-Claudian dynasty collapsed and gave way to theRoman civil war known as theYear of the Four Emperors. By then Calvina was one of Augustus' few remaining descendants who survived the fall of Rome's first Imperial dynasty.