Destiny, however, had not exhausted her possibilities. In 12 B.C. Agrippa died. In the following year Octavia died, and Livia was free to carry out her favourite matrimonial project; the widowed Julia was married to Tiberius, who divorced his wife, Vipsania, to make room for her. This was the first tragedy in the life of Tiberius, destined to bring upon him not only terrible immediate sorrows, but a whole train of calamity, which pursued him to the end of his days. We are told of many Roman nobles that they divorced their wives. Tiberius is the only Roman of whom we are told that he bitterly regretted the wife from whom he had been separated. We do not know by whom this tragedy was brought about, but we do know that, so far as dynastic pretensions were concerned, Tiberius was the last person to be influenced by such a consideration. Whatever ambitions his mother may have formed for her sons, both of them, now men in the prime of life, enjoyed the confidence of Augustus because they had hitherto shown themselves superior to vulgar ambition. Both were by this time experienced generals, for though the command of Tiberius in Armenia may have been nominal rather than real, both he and his brother had conducted a series of campaigns in the difficult regions to the north of the Balkan Peninsula, in the Alpine valleys, and on the frontier of the Rhine. Tiberius had further shown himself a skilled civilian; he had been entrusted not only with the different Republican magistracies, but he had been made chairman of several of those commissions by which the real administrative work was done; he had presided over a very important commission for regulating the corn supply of Rome, and over another for inquiring into the condition of the agricultural slave barracks, whose owners were accused of kidnapping travellers, and offering shelter to freemen who preferred such a life to military service. After the death of Agrippa he was unquestionably the second person in the Empire, for Mæcenas had no hold on the armies, and Tiberius held this position, not as the stepson of Augustus, but as a representative of the oldest and most highly honoured family in Rome, and as the reward of distinguished public services at home and in the field. Caius, the eldest son of Julia, cannot at this time have been more than nine years old; it would be some years before he could take any effective part in public business. Augustus, always in weak health, had to provide for the contingency of his own death, and it must be borne in mind that, quite apart from the comparatively ignoble ambition of founding a dynasty, a sense of duty would impel Augustus to obviate as far as he could the disturbance of a disputed succession. Augustus prided himself upon his position as a pacificator; his reign was a reign of peace, its wars were frontier wars; to allow the apple of discord to drop into the centre of this realm of peace was to destroy his own work.