does not inform us; but certain conclusions are unavoidable, inasmuch as Octavius compelled Claudius Nero to divorce his wife so that he himself might marry her. In order that this marriage might take place, a double divorce was necessary; for Octavius was already united to Scribonia, by whom he had a daughter, Julia, the only child that was ever born to him. He had married Scribonia for purposes of political expediency. At the time of his marriage he was only twenty-three years old, while his bride was his senior by many years and had already lost two husbands by death. The object of this marriage was to win for Octavius the support of Libo, the brother of Scribonia, and through him his son-in-law Sextus Pompeius, who was a man of great influence. This purpose being served, the young ruler found himself at the same time secure in his position and tired of the marital alliance which he had formed for the sake of that security. He alleged perversity of character and incompatibility of temperament--- the only charges he could prefer--in Scribonia, and sent her a letter of separation only a few days after his child had been born. "By this act," says Adolf Stahr, as quoted by S. Baring Gould, "Octavius himself strewed the seeds of discord which were to disturb fatally the concord of the imperial family, not only during his own life, but far beyond it, Scribonia would have been no woman not to have felt deadly hatred toward that woman in whom she saw the robber of her honor, the wrecker of her happiness, the overthrower of her ambition, and by means of whom a new family forced its way into that place which should have been hers and usurped her claims and her hopes. As the mother of Julia, the only daughter of the sovereign, as the ancestress of Julia's children and grandchildren, she remained, in spite of the separation, the head of the Julian race, the dynasty called to sovereignty. No wonder, then, that henceforth she stood in hostile opposition to the Claudian Livia and her two children. This deadly animosity between the two family branches of the imperial house was reflected more than two generations later in the memoirs of the great-grandchild of Scribonia, the second Agrippina, wife of the Emperor Claudius, and mother of Nero, the source whence, poisoned as it was with fiercest hate toward Livia and her son, the Emperor Tiberius, Tacitus drew the colors with which he painted both one and the other in his _Annals_."