He had left a son, Sextus, a man of culture and talent, who remembered his father's fate, and walked for a time warily in politics.

Sextus had married twice.

Once to a very noble lady of the Fabian gens, the mother of his son Quintus.

Then some years after her death he took in marriage a reigning beauty, a certain Valeria, who soon developed such extravagance and frivolity, that, soon after she bore him a daughter, he was forced "to send her a messenger"; in other words, to divorce her.

The daughter had been put under the guardianship of Sextus's sister-in-law Fabia, one of the Vestal virgins at Rome.