What is "octavia"

fem. proper name, from Latin, fem. of Octavius, literally "the eighth" (see Octavian).

Octavia may refer to:

Octavia is a Roman tragedy that focuses on three days in the year 62 AD during which Nero divorced and exiled his wife Claudia Octavia and married another ( Poppaea Sabina). The play also deals with the irascibility of Nero and his inability to take heed of the philosopher Seneca's advice to rein in his passions.

The play was attributed to Seneca, but modern scholarship generally discredits this. It is presumed to have been written later in the Flavian period during the 1st century, after the deaths of both Nero and Seneca.

The Roman Unrest, or The Noble-Minded Octavia (German: Die römische Unruhe, oder Die edelmütige Octavia), commonly called Octavia, is a singspiel in three acts by Reinhard Keiser to a German libretto by . It premiered on 5 August 1705 at the Oper am Gänsemarkt, Hamburg.

The work was written in response to Handel's now-lost Nero, using the same period, material and plot but with Feind substantially improving the libretto. It unites the insidious machinations of the mad emperor Nero, including the assassination plots against his stepsister and wife Octavia, the Pisonian conspiracy and its suppression, with a multicoloured sub-plot of the philosophical instructions of the wise Seneca versus the amusing observations of a clown named Davus. The action is held together by the interweaving of all these plots.

It has an abundance of slippery allusions, grotesque elements like a ballet of the dead, which seems to have been taken from a Shakespearean comedy, but above all shows its librettist's opposition to happy endings beloved of his Hamburg audiences.

Octavia is notable among Keisers's work for its lavish orchestration; it is the first recorded use of horns in an opera, and one aria calls for five bassoons.

The gens Octavia was a plebeian family at Rome, which was raised to patrician status by Caesar during the 1st century BC. The first member of the gens to achieve prominence was Gnaeus Octavius Rufus, quaestor circa 230 BC. Over the following two centuries, the Octavii held many of the highest offices of the state; but the most celebrated of the family was Gaius Octavius, the grand nephew of Caesar and adopted son, who was proclaimed Augustus by the senate in 27 BC.

Octavia is the name of a Bolivian Rock pop band characterized by a unique mix of catchy pop sounds, Andean music, use of electronic synthesizers, and acoustic music. The band's sound is continually evolving but it is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential bands in the history of Bolivian rock.

The Octavia was an effects pedal designed for Jimi Hendrix by his sound technician, Roger Mayer. It reproduces the input signal from a guitar one octave higher and/or lower in pitch, and mixes it with the original and added distortion fuzz.

Octavia is a 1984 American film directed by David Beaird and starring Susan Curtis.