Author Description

Livia was the first empress of Rome. She had lived through the early tempestuous days of her first husband with no whisper of slander. Octavius had married twice for political reasons, but when he met Livia he sent a letter of divorce to his wife (whose great-grandchild became the Empress Agrippina) and intimated to Livia's husband that he must" do likewise. He not only did so in a quite friendly way, but made Octavius at his death the guardian of his two sons, Tiberius and Drusus. Octavius and Livia were content with a prudent adaptation of the old Roman ideal to the new age; and both led sober, ascetic lives. Her wise and humane counsels contributed much to the peace and prosperity of Rome's golden era, which, it must not be lost sight of, was a time when hundreds of thousands of the citizens were parasites upon the state. When Octavius died, worn out with his struggle against dissolute Rome, his last words were for her; and their union had lasted fifty-two years in a town where matrimonial transfers were of no moment whatever.Yet to a man, historians have charged Livia not only with a career of crime, but with an entire absence of self-restraint, which finally caused her husband --who for many years had been curiously blind to her excesses--to banish her. The accusation that she murdered the sons of her step-daughter Julia seems to be largely founded on the undoubted fact that their deaths were very opportune; and the same historians charge her with murdering her second son in the interest of Tiberius, which is somewhat absurd.