Julia represented the prevalent social conditions of her time. Licentiousness, like a cancer, was eating into the heart of Roman society; and this was to grow still worse. It must be admitted also that female degeneracy kept pace with the increase of woman's influence in the political world. Livia and Agrippina the Elder were exceptions; but the rule was, and has been in all history, that the activity of women in State affairs was accompanied by an abundance of meretricious amatory intrigues. It is a remarkable fact that in the history of the Roman woman--and possibly this statement might be given a much wider application--there is no instance where any individual woman designedly helped to bring about the enactment of a law for the public weal. Female politics always had for their object the advancement of the female politician's own personal interests or those of some male favorite. And women could never have favorites outside their own families with safety to their honor. Whenever women have sought high favors either from men or for men, their personal charms have ever been their principal argument and illicit love their chief inducement. One of the most radical of the early changes made in the Roman constitution was brought about by the piqued vanity of a woman. Fabius Ambustus, a man of power and renown in the ancient Republic, had two daughters. One of them was married to a patrician named Sulpicius, while the other was espoused to Stolo, a plebeian tribune. This office was the highest to which at the time a man of plebeian birth could lawfully aspire. One day the wife of Stolo, being at her sister's house, was startled by the sound of the lictor's staff at the door--a mode of announcement to which plebeian ears were unaccustomed. Being laughed at by Sulpicia, she went to her own home in high dudgeon, and henceforth neither Fabius Ambustus nor Stolo could gain any relief from her complaints until they had brought it to pass that the Senate consented to the conferring of magisterial office upon plebeians, with the consequence that her husband also might be attended by a lictor with his axe and rods. The story is important because it illustrates the greater portion of the Roman woman's interest in politics. Livia was now the sole woman of influence in the imperial palace. Scribonia had voluntarily accompanied her daughter into exile; and the daughter of Julia, who had inherited both her mother's name and her failings, was banished from the city. It was not difficult now for Livia to secure the adoption of Tiberius by Augustus as his son and also as his heir. This, however, was not done without causing some misgivings in the minds of the Romans, who, as Tacitus says, feared to be under bondage to a woman "with the ungovernable spirit peculiar to her sex."