The person who had the likeliest prospect of the succession seemed to be M. Marcellus, the son of the emperor’s sister Octavia by her first marriage. He was treated with the utmost distinction by Augustus, who loaded him with honours in quick succession and married him at an early age to his daughter Julia, to the great mortification of the haughty and ambitious Livia, who, having borne no children to her imperial spouse, desired to secure the first place after the monarch and the reversion of the throne for her sons Tiberius and Drusus. [Sidenote: [21 B.C.-2 A.D.]] A second rival to the youthful Marcellus arose in the person of his own brother-in-law Agrippa, the famous general to whom Augustus chiefly owed his victories over Sext. Pompeius and Antony, and whom he himself had encouraged to cherish the most daring hopes by high distinctions and proofs of favour. When the enmity between Agrippa and Marcellus grew too plainly manifest, the emperor despatched the former to Asia under pretext of an honourable mission. But Agrippa, looking upon this as a kind of banishment, ruled the province through his legate, while he himself remained at Lesbos, his gaze riveted upon Rome. Fate intervened to save Augustus from painful experience of the affronted pride of an ambitious man. Marcellus died in the year 23, universally lamented by the Roman people, whose darling he was. It was shrewdly suspected that he had fallen a victim to the rancour and intrigues of Livia, who, by birth a member of the Claudian family, had inherited all the pride and jealous ambition of their old patrician blood. Augustus, dismayed by the disturbances at Rome in the year 22, and the evidences of a conspiracy against his life which then came to light, made haste to be reconciled with Agrippa, and, by marrying him to Julia, assured him of the first place after his own and the prospect of the succession. Octavia, the emperor’s sister, moved by envy and jealousy of Livia, gladly agreed to Agrippa’s divorce from her daughter Marcella, that so she might thwart the ambitious schemes of the emperor’s consort. A few years later Agrippa journeyed to the East, accompanied by Julia, to set in order the complications and struggles for the throne which had arisen in various districts from the Bosporus to Syria. His presence was a blessing to the Asiatic provinces and dependent states; he reconciled the wrangling members of the empire by admonitions and commands, and perpetuated the name of his wife by founding on the site of the ancient and ruinous seaport of Berytus the colony of Julia Felix, which was provided with a garrison of two legions and became the centre of Roman dominion in Syria. As Agrippa was returning to Italy after a stay of some years in the East, he succumbed to sickness in the fifty-first year of his age. He died in Campania in 12 B.C.