Is there anyone who wants to help clean up the line for Julius Caesar, Roman Dictator?
I noticed the other day we have some partially merged trees and some remaining in the area around him.
Then later I was lying in bed, being kept awake by the thought "How do we know the Julii Caesars are really descended from the Julii Libos? What's the actual evidence?" (These things torment me, as they do all of us)
So the next morning I checked Geni. We have Lucius Julius Libo, consul 267 BC, but he's not properly sourced yet. Just a bunch of gibberish from old merges.
So, next Wikipedia to see if I can get a lead on some sources. Some info there. His ancestors and descendants are speculative, but hard to judge just how speculative without seeing the actual sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Julius_Libo
A footnote in the Wikipedia article is quite critical of a chart by Berry. That's William Berry, Genealogia Antiqua (1816), page 50. I took a look. I've seen this version before, but no, that's not how we have it on Geni.
https://books.google.com/books?id=Dk4MAQAAMAAJ&vq=libo&pg=P...
So, I looked at James Anderson, Royal Genealogies (1732). For reasons I don't understand Anderson is nearly always the ultimate source for bad genealogies on the Internet. Yep, this one matches what we have on Geni. More or less. Hard to get a good link here. There relevant info is in Chart CXXII on page 350, not to be confused with table CXV also on a page 350. The chart is hard to read in a browser but worth the effort.
https://books.google.com/books?id=yrqeY839bMwC&vq=libo&pg=P...
But the question is whether this chart by Anderson is any good. No. Its not.
Wikipedia gives a clue more research is needed when it says, "It is not known whether Libo was descended from one of the Julii Iuli, or from a collateral branch of the family, nor whether he was an ancestor of the Caesars, although it has long been conjectured that they were his descendants.[i] In recent years, one scholar has postulated that Lucius Julius, the father of Sextus Julius Caesar, who was praetor in 208 BC, was the son of Libo, but if so it is not clear whether his surname was Libo or Caesar."
(This passage is a bit misleading, as one might expect from Wikipedia. It cites William Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1849) for the suggestion the Julii Caesars were descendants of the Julii Libos. Smith says nothing of the sort. He just gives a brief bio for consul Lucius Julius Libo.)
So, we need to look for a more modern, academic source. The one cited in the Wikipedia article is Miriam Griffin, A Companion to Julius Caesar (2009), pp. 13-14. Publisher is John Wiley & Sons, a company that specializes in academic publishing. Miriam Griffin is an American classical scholar who is a tutor at Oxford University. Looks like a solid secondary source. She explains the conjectures that lead to connecting the Caesars and Libos. The detail she gives shows that Geni's tree must be very horribly wrong over the course of many generations.
https://books.google.com/books?id=gzOXLGbIIYwC&pg=PA13#v=onepag...
So we look further. One source I found is a biography of Julius Caesar: Richard A. Billows, Julius Caesar: The Colossus of Rome (2008). Publisher is Routledge, probably the leading publisher of academic books. Richard Billows is a professor of history at Columbia University, specializing in this area. Looks like another solid secondary source. The tabular genealogy on p. xvii shows just how bad Geni's version really is.
https://books.google.com/books?id=TeF-AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA31&dq=f...
If we attack this problem it's going to be painful, very painful. For awhile it will look like we are vandalizing the tree. That's why I'm taking so much time on this message. Who's on board?
