Shortly after the death of Marcellus, Julia was again married, this time to the great warrior Agrippa, the staunch friend of her father. This also was distinctly a political marriage. Julia was eighteen, Agrippa was forty-two, while at the time of betrothal he was already wedded to Marcella, the daughter of Octavia. The usual divorce severed these bonds, and Marcella was given to Antonius, the son of the triumvir. Both Octavia and Scribonia were desirous of this matrimonial readjustment. They probably saw that Julia needed a firm disciplinarian like Agrippa to keep the questionable proclivities of her character from attaining too exuberant a freedom. It is also likely that they hoped that this union would result in heirs who would frustrate the expectations of Livia and her sons. But to their check thus played, Livia, in due time, answered with a decisive mate. To Julia and Agrippa there were born three sons and one daughter, named respectively Lucius, Caius, Agrippa Posthumus, and Julia. Thus Tacitus relates the dénouement: "Augustus had adopted Lucius and Caius into the Cæsarian family; and although they had not yet laid aside the puerile garment, his ambition was strong to see them declared princes of the Roman youth, and even mentioned for the consulship; at the same time, he affected to decline these honors for them. Upon the death of Agrippa, they were cut off, either by a decease premature but natural, or by the arts of their stepmother Livia: Lucius on his journey to the armies in Spain, Caius on his return from Armenia, ill of a wound. And as Drusus had been long since dead, Tiberius Nero was the only surviving stepson. On him every honor was accumulated, he was adopted by Augustus as his son and a colleague in the Empire ... and this was brought about, not by the secret machinations of his mother, as heretofore, but at her open suit. For over Augustus, now aged, she had obtained such absolute sway that he had banished his only surviving grandson, Agrippa Posthumus, a person of clownish brutality, with great bodily strength, but convicted of no heinous offence."