Now Julia deserves far greater sympathy than she has popularly won. She was, I believe, naturally a decent, goodhearted woman, though fond of pleasures and excitements, md the only one of my female relations who had a kindly word for me. I also believe that there were no grounds for the charges made against her many years later, of infidelity to Agrippa while she was married to him. Certainly all her three boys resembled him closely. The true story is as follows. In her widowhood, as I have related, she fell in love with Tiberius and persuaded Augustus to let her marry him. Tiberius, enraged at having had to divorce his own ivife for her sake, treated her very coldly. She was then imprudent enough to approach Livia, whom she feared but trusted, and ask her advice. Livia gave her a love-philtre, which she was to drink, saying that within a year it would make her irresistible to her husband, but that she must take it once a month, at full moon, and make certain prayers to Venus, saying nothing about it to a living soul, or the drug would lose its virtue and do her a great deal of harm.
What Livia very cruelly gave her was a distillation of the crushed bodies of certain little green flies, from Spain, ivhich so stimulated her sexual appetite that she became like a demented woman. [I will explain later how I came to learn all this.] For a while indeed she fired Tiberius' ippetite by the abandoned wantonness to which the drug irove her, against her natural modesty; but soon she wearied him and he refused to have any further marital commerce with her. She was forced by the action of the drug, which I suppose became a habit with her, to satisfy ner sexual cravings by adulterous intercourse with whatever young courtiers she could trust to behave with discretion she did this in Rome, I mean: in Germany and France she seduced private soldiers of Tiberius' bodyguard and even German slaves, threatening, if they hesitated, to accuse them of offering her familiarities and to have them t73] flogged to death. As she was still a fine-looking woman, they apparently did not hesitate long.
After Tiberius' banishment Julia grew careless, and all Rome soon came to know of her infidelities, Livia never said a word to Augustus, confident that in due time he would come to hear about them from some other quarter.
But Augustus' blind love for Julia was a by-word and nobody dared to say anything to him. After a time it was generally assumed that he could no longer be ignorant, and that his condonation of her behaviour was a further caution to silence. Julia's nocturnal orgies in the Market Place and on the Oration Platform itself had become a matter of grave public scandal, yet it was four years before so much as a rumour reached Augustus. Then he heard the whole story from none other than her sons, Gaius and Lucius, who came together into his presence and angrily asked him how long was he going to permit himself and his grandchildren to be disgraced. They understood, they said, that regard for the family's good name made him very patient with their mother, but surely there was a limit to his longsufferingi Were they to wait until she presented them with a litter of many-fathered bastard brothers before any official notice was taken of her pranks?
Augustus listened with horror and amazement and for a long time could do no more than gape and move his lips. When he found his voice it was to call in strangled tones for Livia. They repeated their story in her presence, and she pretended to sob, saying that it had been her greatest grief these three years that Augustus had deliberately shut his ears to the truth. Several times, she said, she had gathered up courage to speak to him, but it had been quite clear that he did not want to listen to a word she said. "I was confident that you really knew all about it and that the subject was too painful for you to discuss even with me...." Augustus, weeping, with his head between his hands, muttered that he had never heard the slightest whisper, or entertained the faintest suspicion that his daughter was not the chastest woman at Rome. Livia asked, why then did he suppose that her son Tiberius had gone into exile. For love of exile?
No, it was because he was unable to check the excesses of his wife and yet was distressed that Augustus was condoning them, [74] for so he believed; and since he did not wish to antagonise Gaius and Lucius, her sons, by asking Augus: us for leave to divorce her, there was no course open for him but to withdraw decently from the scene.
This talk about Tiberius was wasted on Augustus, who threw a fold of his robe over his head and groped his way to the passage leading to his bedroom, where he locked himself in and was seen by nobody, not even by Livia, for ? our whole days, during which time he took no food or irink, nor any sleep, and what was still stronger proof--if any was required--of the violence of his grief, went all that time unshaved. Finally he pulled the string which ran through a hole in the wall and tinkled a little silver bell in Livia's room. Livia came hurrying to him with a face of loving concern, and Augustus, not yet trusting his voice, wrote down on his wax-tablet the single sentence, in Greek: "Let her be banished for life, but do not tell me where." He handed Livia his seal-ring so that she might write letters to the Senate by his authority, recommending the banishment. [This seal, by the way, was the great emerald cut with the helmeted head of Alexander the Great from whose tomb it had been stolen, along with a sword and breast-plate and other personal trappings of the hero. Livia insisted on his using it, in spite of his scruples--he realised how presumptuous it was--until one night he had a dream in which Alexander, frowning angrily, hacked off with his sword the finger on which he wore it.
Then he had a seal of his own, a ruby from India, cut by the famous goldsmith Dioscurides, which all his successors have used as the token of their sovereignty.]
Livia wrote the recommendation for banishment in very strong terms. It was composed in Augustus' own literary style; which was easy to imitate because it always sacriEced elegance to clarity--for example, by a determined repetition of the same word, where it occurred often in a passage, instead of hunting about for a synonym or periphrasis [which is the common literary practice]. And he had a tendency to over-prepositionalize his verbs. She did not show the letter to Augustus but sent it direct to the Senate, who immediately voted a decree of perpetual banishment.
Livia had listed Julia's crimes in such detail and had credited [75] Augustus with such calm expressions of detestation for them that she made it impossible for him ever afterwards to change his mind and ask the Senate to cancel their decision. She did a good piece of business on the side, too, by singling out for special mention as Julia's partners in adultery three or four men whom it was to her interest to ruin. Among them was an uncle of mine, lulus, a son of Antony, to whom Augustus had shown great favour for Octavia's sake, raising him to the Consulship. Livia, in naming him in her letter to the Senate, strongly emphasized the ingratitude that he had shown his benefactor and hinted that he and Julia were conspiring together to seize the supreme power. lulus committed suicide. I believe that the charge of conspiracy was groundless, but as the only surviving son of Antony, by his wife Fulvia--Augustus had put Antyllus, the eldest, to death immediately after his father's suicide, and the other two, Ptolemy and Alexander, his sons by Cleopatra, had died young--and as an ex-Consul and the husband of Marcellus' sister, whom Agrippa had divorced, he seemed dangerous. Popular discontent with Augustus often expressed itself in a wish that it had been Antony who had won the Battle of Actium.
The other men whom Livia accused of adultery were banished.