These are a few of the stories which illustrate the want of harmony between them. For this Livia was largely to blame. It was not unnatural that she, who had been so often and so profitably consulted by Octavian, should expect a larger power under the young Emperor, but she failed to take discreet account of the extreme sensitiveness of Tiberius. If a story given in Suetonius is correct, she so far lost her discretion in one of their quarrels as to produce old letters in which Octavian had made bitter reflections on the defects of Tiberius. The fault was not wholly on her side, however. Tiberius was jealous when he contrasted the honour and respect paid to her with the general feeling of reserve and distrust toward himself, and he pleaded the old-fashioned idea of woman’s sphere as a pretext to restrain her. He grumbled when he one day found her directing the extinction of a fire, as she had done more than once in Octavian’s time, and he was seriously angry when he found that she had placed her name before his on a public inscription. But we may leave these lesser matters and come to the next tragedy in the Imperial chronicle, the shadow of which darkened Livia’s closing years. She had retired from the palace to the house which she had inherited from her first husband, Tiberius Nero. Here she remained a saddened and helpless spectator of the coming disaster. Tiberius, whom she saw only once more before she died, had become a peevish and gloomy old man. His tall spare frame was bent, his head bald, his face, which had always been disfigured with pimples, now hideous with eczema, or concealed with bandages. His large melancholy eyes so startled people that they believed he could see in the dark. Astrologers and students of the occult gathered about him in the palace he had built on the Palatine, and the way lay open for adventurers. The two chief aspirants for power were Agrippina, the widow of Germanicus, and Sejanus, Tiberius’s favourite general. Julia’s younger daughter seems to have concentrated in her person all the masculinity of her family. “Implacable,” as Tacitus says, proud, and ambitious, she added to the gloom that was deepening on the Palatine. Merivale calls her the “she-wolf.” It seems probable that she sought marriage with the aged Tiberius in order to secure power for herself or her son. The only son of the Emperor had been poisoned by Sejanus, as we shall see presently, and her son had a plausible title to inherit the purple. The authorities tell us that Tiberius one day found her in tears, and was entreated, when he asked the reason, to find her a husband. She thought it expedient to forget the supposed share of Tiberius in the death of her husband.