Trajan's birth, it was a small town, without baths, theatre and amphitheatre, and with a very narrow territory under its direct administration. His year of birth is not reliably attested and may have been 56 AD. Some ancient authors, most notably Cassius Dio, claim that Trajan was the first emperor of non-Italic origins. However, Trajan's patria of Italica, in Spanish Baetica, was a Roman colony of Italic settlers founded in 206BC by Scipio Africanus. Trajan's paternal branch of the gens Ulpia came from Umbria, particularly from the city of Tuder (Todi), and was either among the original settlers of the town or arrived there at an unknown time, and his maternal gens Marcia was of Sabine origin. For this reason, modern historians, such as Julian Bennett, reject Dio's claim. It is possible, but cannot be substantiated, that Trajan's ancestors married locals and lost their citizenship at some point, but they would have certainly recovered their status when the city became a municipium with Latin citizenship in the mid-1st century BC. Trajan was the son of Marcia, a Roman noblewoman and sister-in-law of the second Flavian Emperor Titus, and Marcus Ulpius Trajanus, a prominent senator and general from the gens Ulpia. Marcus Ulpius Trajanus the elder served Vespasian in the First Jewish-Roman War, commanding the Legio X Fretensis. Trajan himself was just one of many well-known Ulpii in a line that continued long after his own death. His elder sister was Ulpia Marciana, and his niece was Salonia Matidia. Very little is known about Trajan's early formative years, but it is thought likely that he spent his first months or years in Italica before moving to Rome and then, perhaps at around eight or nine years of age, he almost certainly would have returned temporarily to Italica with his father during Trajanus’ governorship of Baetica (ca. 64–65). The lack of a strong local power base caused by the size of the town from which they came, made it necessary for the Ulpii (and for the Aelii, the other important senatorial family of Italica with whom they were allied) to weave local alliances, in the Baetica (with the Annii, the Ucubi and perhaps the Dasumii from Corduba), the Tarraconense and the Narbonense, here above all through Pompeia Plotina, Trajan's wife. Many of these alliances were made not in Spain, but in Rome. The family home in Rome, the Domus Traiana, was on