Julia had by this time worked out her own condemnation. Those stories of her flagrant misconduct which for years had been part of the common gossip of the baths and porticoes of the city at last reached the ears of her father. He tried not to believe them. Gazing fondly upon his only child, he said; "Just like her I am sure that Claudia must have looked, of whom our forefathers told that she was slandered. But she proved her innocence." Those to whom he said this listened respectfully; but behind his back they sneered. After Agrippa's death, Julia had made another political marriage. Tiberius had been compelled to put away his wife, Vipsania, the daughter of Agrippa, whom he dearly loved,--she was probably the only human being for whom this morose man ever had any real affection,--and was forced, much against his will, to replace her by Agrippa's widow. Tiberius knew Julia as her father did not; and, rather than live with her, he betook himself to a voluntary exile in Rhodes. By thus doing, he seemed to frustrate all his mother's plans for his advancement; but she, with deadly persistency, determined that there should be in Cæsar's family no other candidate for the imperial position, which must soon be vacated. There is some hint of Julia's misdoings coming to light through the discovery of a plot, in which Livia had no part, to shorten the emperor's days; but there is no proof, nor does it seem probable, that Julia was a conspirator against her father's life. She was probably the tool of others. Augustus, however, was constrained to institute an investigation, which revealed to him all the turpitude of his daughter's conduct; she was banished to an island in the Bay of Naples, and there strictly guarded until the day of her death. The case of Julia gives no occasion for pity, except for the gray-haired old man who had lost by death all those upon whom he had rested his ambitious hopes for the future of his house. None were left save Livia,--probably Augustus himself never for a moment entertained a suspicion that his wife was the cause of his misfortunes,--Tiberius, whom he never loved, and this woman, whom he wished had died in her infancy. And yet the edge is taken from any sympathy one might have for Augustus, when it is remembered that, notwithstanding his stern demand for chastity on the part of the women of his own family and all of noble birth, his own conduct, if Suetonius reports truthfully, was no better than that of his daughter. But to condemn licentiousness in their women and to practise it themselves did not seem to the men of Rome to be either illogical or inconsistent.