Endnote 18 – How Babies Were Made in Jesus’ Time

See e.g., Suetonius’ Life of Augustus. At the beginning of his work, Suetonius simply talks of Augustus as the son of Octavius by Atia and deals with his paternal ancestors, but then toward the end he includes the quite different story of Apollo coming to Atia in the form of a snake and of her giving birth to Augustus ten months after this so that it was held that he was the son of Apollo (Augustus 2, 4, 94). Similarly, Dio Cassius later gives his version of Augustus’s beginnings, also juxtaposing the two perspectives (Historiae Romanae 45.1).