Julia (c. 76 BC – 54 BC) was the daughter of Roman dictator Julius Caesar by his first or second wife Cornelia, and his only child from his marriages. Julia became the fourth wife of Pompey the Great and was renowned for her beauty and virtue. Julia was probably born around 76 BC. Her mother died in 69 BC when Julia was only seven years old, after which she was raised by her paternal grandmother Aurelia Cotta. Her father engaged her to a Servilius Caepio.

There has been a notion that it could have been Marcus Junius Brutus (Caesar's most famous assassin), who, after being adopted by his uncle, was known as Quintus Servilius Caepio Brutus for an unknown period of time. This is just conjecture. Caesar broke off this engagement and married her to Pompey in April 59 BC, with whom Caesar sought a strong political alliance in forming the First Triumvirate. This family-alliance of its two great chiefs was regarded as the firmest bond between Caesar and Pompey, and was accordingly viewed with much alarm by the optimates (the oligarchal party in Rome), especially by Marcus Tullius Cicero and Cato the Younger.

Pompey was supposedly infatuated with his bride. The personal charms of Julia were remarkable: she was a kind woman of beauty and virtue; and although policy prompted her union, and she was thirty years younger than her husband, she possessed in Pompey a devoted husband, to whom she was, in return, reportedly attached. A rumor suggested that the middle aged conqueror was losing interest in politics in favor of domestic life with his young wife. In fact, Pompey had been given the governorship of Hispania Ulterior, but had been permitted to remain in Rome to oversee the Roman grain supply as curator annonae, exercising his command through subordinates.

Julia died before a breach between her husband and father had become inevitable. Plutarch reports that at the election of aediles in 55 BC, Pompey was surrounded by a tumultuous mob, and his robe was stained with the blood of some of the rioters. A slave carried the stained toga to his house on the Carinae and was seen by Julia. Imagining that her husband was slain, she fell into premature labor, miscarrying thereafter. As a result of the miscarriage, her health was irreparably damaged. In August of the next year, 54 BC, she died in childbirth, and her infant—a son, according to some writers, a daughter, according to others,—did not survive and died along with Julia. Caesar was in Britain, according to Seneca, when he received the news of Julia's death.

Pompey wished her ashes to repose in his favourite Alban villa, but the Roman people, who loved Julia, determined they should rest in the field of Mars (Campus Martius). For permission a special decree of the senate was necessary, and Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, one of the consuls of 54 BC, impelled by his hatred for Pompey and Caesar, procured an interdict from the tribunes. But the popular will prevailed, and, after listening to a funeral oration in the forum, the people placed her urn in the field of Mars.

Bio Courtesy of: Wikipedia