ich had flourished at Alexandria
under the Ptolemies were gradually transplanted to Rome, where the
merchants hoped to establish among their conquerors the clientele which
had been lost with the fall of the Kingdom of the Nile. The ladies
especially took up with the new oriental customs, and, preferring
expensive stuffs and jewels, turned from the loom, which Livia had
wished to preserve as the emblem of womanhood. Many young men of the
great families were beginning to show a distaste for the army, for the
government of the state, for jurisprudence, for all those activities
which had been the jealous privilege of the nobility of the past. One
gave himself up to literary pursuits, another cultivated philosophy,
another busied himself only with the increase of his inherited fortune,
while another lived only in pleasure and idleness. So it happened that
there began to appear descendants of great houses who refused to be
senators; every year an effort had to be made to find a sufficient
number of candidates for the more numerous positions like the
questorship, and in the army it was no easy matter to fill all the
posts of the superior officers which were reserved for members of the
nobility.

[Illustration: The Emperor Augustus. This statue was found in 1910 in
the Via Labicana, not far from the Colosseum.]

The Roman aristocracy then, that glorious Roman aristocracy which had
escaped the massacres of the proscriptions and of Philippi, ran grave
danger of dying out through a species of slow suicide, if energetic
measures were not taken to supply the necessary remedies. It is
certain that Livia had a conspicuous part in the policy of restoring
the aristocracy, to which Augustus was impelled by the old nobility,
especially toward the year 18 B.C., when with this purpose in view he
proposed his famous social laws. The _Lex de maritandis ordinibus_
attempted by various penalties and promises to constrain the members of
the aristocracy to contract marriage and to found a family, thus
combatting the increasing inclination to celibacy and sterility. The
_Lex de adulteriis_ aimed to reestablish order and virtue in the
family, by threatening the unfaithful wife and her accomplice with
exile for life and the confiscation of a part of their substance. It
obliged the husband to expose the crime to the tribunals; if the
husband could not or would not make the accusation, it provided that
the father should do so; and in case b