Vespasia Polla

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Vespasia Polla (also known as Vespasia Pollio, flourished 1st century) was the mother of the Roman Emperor Vespasian, grandmother to Emperors to Titus and Domitian. Polla came from a good equestrian family at Nursia. Suetonius (Life of Vespasian, 1.2-3) states that her father was:

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Vespasius Pollio, thrice military tribune and prefect of the camp, while her brother became a senator with the rank of praetor. There is moreover on the top of a mountain, near the sixth milestone on the road from Nursia to Spoletium [modern Spoleto], a place called Vespasiae, where many monuments of the Vespasii are to be seen, affording strong proof of the renown and antiquity of the house.

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She married a tax collector Titus Flavius Sabinus, and survived him. Their children were a daughter who died in her infancy; a younger Sabinus and Vespasian. After her husband died she never remarried.

Sabinus achieved the senatorial rank, but Vespasian put off doing so. Suetonius (2.2) states that:

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only his mother could finally induce him to sue for it. She at length drove him to it, but rather by sarcasm than by entreaties or parental authority, since she constantly taunted him with being his brother's footman.

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