he who devised this historic marriage was
none other than that same first husband of Livia, Tiberius Claudius
Nero himself! According to our ideas it is inconceivable; but not at
all strange according to the ideas of the Roman. It is probable that
Tiberius Claudius Nero, feeling that the triumph of the revolution was
now assured, had wished by this marriage to attach to the cause of the
old aristocracy the youngest of the three revolutionary leaders.
Already well along in years and infirm,--he was to die shortly
after,--Nero, who well knew the intelligence of his young wife, was
perhaps planning to place her in the house of the man in whom all saw
one of the future lords of Rome. Thus he would bind him to the
interests of the aristocracy. In the person of Livia there entered
into the house of Octavianus the old Roman nobility, which, defeated at
Philippi, was striving to reacquire through the prestige and the
cleverness of a woman what it had not been able to maintain by arms.

All her life long, with constancy, moderation, and wonderful tact,
Livia fulfilled her mission. She succeeded in resolving into the
admirable harmony of a long existence that contradiction between the
liberty conceded to her sex and the self-denial demanded of it by man
as a duty. She was assuredly one of the most perfect models of that
lady of high society whom the Romans in all the years of their long and
tempestuous history never ceased to admire. Even and serene,
completely mistress of herself and of her passions, endowed with a
robust will, she accommodated herself without difficulty to all the
sacrifices which her rank and situation imposed upon her. She changed
husbands without repugnance, though her marriage to Octavianus occurred
but five years after the proscriptions, while he was still red with the
blood of her family and friends. Likewise she renounced her two sons,
the future emperor Tiberius, who had been born before her second
marriage, as well as the one who had been born after. So too when, a
few years later, Tiberius Claudius Nero died, appointing Augustus their
guardian, with equal serenity she took them back and educated them with
the most careful motherly solicitude. To the second husband, whom
politics had given her, she was a faithful companion. Scandal imputed
to her absurd poisonings which she did not commit, and accused her of
insatiable ambitions and perfidious intrigues. No one ever dared
accuse her of inf