shrank from no crime, had gradually gotten the most absolute sway over Augustus. However much he sought to bring back purity of morals, he himself was a thorough profligate; and this Livia winked at. They were married to each other nearly fifty years; and the longer they lived together, the greater became her power. She must have been wondrously beautiful in her youth, and amazingly clever: for a long course of years, she strove with quiet patience to get the dominion for her race; and for this purpose she estranged Augustus from the whole of his family. The only child she had borne him was still-born. So long as Octavia, the half-sister of Augustus, and one of the most respectable of the later Roman matrons, was alive and had prospects for her son Marcellus, who was married to Julia, she herself seemed to have been altogether set aside. But after the death of Marcellus, Agrippa became more powerful than ever, though he had already gained such an ascendancy, that Augustus, had he not loved him much, must have been afraid of him; and now the emperor bound him to him by the marriage with Julia, because he really feared him: Julia had by Marcellus one daughter only. Agrippa was much older than Augustus, with whom he had been as a sort of tutor in Apollonia; it is not unlikely that Cæsar had meant him to accompany his nephew as _custos_ to the Parthian war, as was generally done when the youthful Roman at seventeen first joined the army: thus Lollius went with C. Cæsar. Before that time, nothing is mentioned about him, nor can any one tell where he came from; in Cæsar’s campaigns, he is not once named: he is said to have been _ignobili_, even _humili loco natus_. He afterwards shows himself to have been an experienced general. Augustus’ best time was that during which Agrippa’s influence was paramount with him; that is to say, almost the whole unbroken period from the battle of Actium to the death of Agrippa, whom no one accuses of having had any share in the earlier crimes of his pupil. It is he, above all men, who gave the state its form; he is, more than Augustus, the author of the most useful institutions,—perhaps also of some artful ones, but certainly of all that had any good in them. Besides which, there was something grand about him. We have but one building left of his, the Pantheon, which indeed is the finest relic of ancient Rome. He had a genius for vast and magnificent works, for roads, canals, aqueducts, baths: he so laid out the whole of the Campus Martius, that Strabo is quite in ecstacies whilst describing it. In the war against Pompey, he displayed tried ability: moreover, he then built a fleet and the _portus Julius_. He was thrice consul, and openly laid claim to the highest honours: for he looked upon them as his due, being anything but cowed and daunted before Augustus. He died, I believe, in 740; Mæcenas in 744, in the same year as Horace.