His Family Was Wealthy
One of the interesting facts about Marcus Aurelius is he hailed from a well-off, powerful political family. The Caelian Hill, a fashionable neighborhood with lots of aristocratic villas, was where his family lived.
Roman Italo-Hispanic heritage was present in Marcus's paternal line. Marcus Annius Verus served as his father (III). A branch of the gens Annia, which claimed to be descended from Numa Pompilius and have Italic origins, relocated to Ucubi, a tiny hamlet in Iberian Baetica to the southeast of Cordoba. The Annii Veri, a branch of the Aurelii rooted in Roman Spain, became well-known in Rome in the latter part of the first century AD. Marcus's grandpa Marcus Annius Verus (II) was elevated to the patrician status in 73–74, while his great-grandfather Marcus Annius Verus (I) served as a senator and former praetor, according to the Historia Augusta. Marcus belonged to the Nerva-Antonine dynasty through his grandmother Rupilia Faustina; Rupilia and her step-sister, Hadrian's bride Sabina, were raised by Trajan's sororal niece Salonia Matidia.
Domitia Lucilla Minor, commonly known as Domitia Calvilla, was Marcus' mother and the daughter of Roman aristocrat P. Calvisius Tullus. She received a sizable fortune from her parents and grandparents, which Pliny detailed in great detail in one of his letters. Her inheritance contained the Horti Domitia Calvillae (or Lucillae), a villa on the Caelian hill of Rome, as well as sizable brickworks on the outskirts of Rome, a lucrative business at a time when the city was experiencing a construction boom.
