strong social
discipline, is the most beneficent and tenacious among the cohesive
forces of a nation; and why, in times when social discipline is
relaxed, she is, instead, through ruinous luxury, dissipation, and
voluntary sterility, the most terrible force for dissolution.

[Illustration: The sister of M. Nonius Balbus.]

One of the greatest problems of every epoch and all civilizations is to
find a balance between the natural aspiration for freedom that is none
other than the need of personal felicity--a need as lively and profound
in the heart of woman as of man--and the supreme necessity for a
discipline without which the race, the state, and the family run the
gravest danger. Yet this problem to-day, in the unmeasured
exhilaration with which riches and power intoxicate the
European-American civilization, is considered with the superficial
frivolity and the voluble dilettantism that despoil or confuse all the
great problems of esthetics, philosophy, statesmanship, and morality.
We live in the midst of what might be called the Saturnalia of the
world's history; and in the midst of the swift and easy labor, the
inebriety of our continual festivities, we feel no more the tragic in
life. This short history of the women of the Caesars will set before
the eyes of this pleasure-loving contemporary age tragedies among whose
ruins our ancestors lived from birth to death, and by which they
tempered their minds.

II

LIVIA AND JULIA

In the year 38 B.C. it suddenly became known at Rome that C. Julius
Caesar Octavianus (afterward the Emperor Augustus), one of the
triumvirs of the republic, and colleague of Mark Antony and Lepidus in
the military dictatorship established after the death of Caesar, had
sent up for decision to the pontifical college, the highest religious
authority of the state, a curious question. It was this: Might a
divorced woman who was expecting to become a mother contract a marriage
with another man before the birth of her child? The pontifical college
replied that if there still was doubt about the fact the new marriage
would not be permissible; but if it was certain, there would be no
impediment. A few days later, it was learned that Octavianus had
divorced his wife Scribonia and had married Livia, a young woman of
nineteen. Livia's physical condition was precisely that concerning
which the pontiffs had been asked to decide, and in order to enter into
this marriage she had obtained a di