Many a father had disdainfully refused to be the
executioner of his own daughter, leaving to others the grim office of
applying the _lex Julia_. Could he imitate such an example? He was the
head of the Republic, the most powerful man of the Empire, the founder
of a new political order; he could decide peace and war, govern the
Senate at his pleasure, exalt or abase the powerful of the earth with
a nod; and exactly for this reason he dared not evade the bitter task.
He feared the envy, the moral and levelling prejudices of the middle
classes, which needed every now and then to slaughter in the courts
some one belonging to the upper classes, in order to delude themselves
that justice is equal for all. To him had been granted the greatest
privileges; but precisely on this account was it dangerous to try to
cover his daughter with a privileged protection as prey too delicate
for public attack. And then, if he himself gave the example of
disobeying his law, who would observe it? The tremendous scandal would
unnerve all the moral force of his legislation, which was the base
of his prestige. The moment was terrible. Imagine this old man of
sixty-two wearied by forty-four years of public life, embittered
by the difficulties that sprang up about him, disquieted by the
dissolution of State of which he was the impotent witness, finding
himself all at once facing these alternatives--either destroy his
daughter, or undo all the political work over which he had laboured
for thirty years; and no temporising possible!

Augustus was not a naturally cruel man, but before these alternatives
his mind seems to have been for a moment convulsed by an access of
grief and rage, the distant echo of which has come down to us. One
moment, as Suetonius says, he had the idea of killing Julia. Then
reason, pity, affection, gentler habits, prevailed. He did not give
the sentence of death, but he was too practised a politician not
to understand that she could not be saved; and as he had immolated
Cicero, Lepidus, Antony, so he immolated her also to the necessity
of preserving before Italy his prestige of severe legislator and
impartial magistrate. To avoid the trial, he resolved to punish her
himself with his power of _pater familias_ according to the _lex
Julia_, exiling her to Pandataria and announcing the divorce to her
in the name of Tiberius. He then despatched to the Senate a record of
what he had done, and went away to the country, where he rem