Between Nerva and Marcus Aurelius heirs to the throne were selected and adopted without obvious concern for family relationships. Some had no link to the existing emperor by blood or marriage at all, or only a remote one, and they came from further afield. Trajan, the first such adoptee, was originally from Spain; the families of others came from either there or Gaul. They were the descendants of early Roman settlers abroad, who had probably married into the local communities, rather than from the indigenous population. But, in a way that dramatically fulfilled the Roman project of
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