to the Julian dynasty, and when Tiberius returned to Rome from the Rhine in A.D. 12, his adoption and investiture with the Proconsular Power seemed to extinguish the hopes of its representatives. The direct descendants of Augustus now living were his daughter Julia, disgraced and in exile, her daughter Julia similarly disgraced and in exile, Agrippa Postumus, the intractable, a young man about twenty-four years of age, who either now, or a little later, enjoyed, like his mother and sister, the amenities of life on an island; the only descendant in the third generation who had not been thus disgraced and banished was Agrippina, the younger daughter of Julia. Nobody took the Julian legend more seriously than this lady, and her children enjoyed a double stream of the sacred blood, for she had married Germanicus, the son of Drusus and Antonia the beautiful, who was own niece to Augustus. Germanicus was now twenty-seven years of age; he had been through the Pannonian campaign, and was left by Tiberius in command of the army on the Lower Rhine. Tiberius seems to have had more confidence in him than in his own son Drusus, and Germanicus had so far shown himself worthy of that confidence; he was blessed with a numerous family, of whom Agrippina was inordinately proud; she was the mother of the great-grandchildren of Augustus, a Nero, a Drusus, a Caius, another Agrippina, a Drusilla, and a Julia Livilla, who eventually married the friend of Paterculus, Marcus Vinicius. Julia her sister had only borne two daughters before retiring to her island. Agrippina was not a mere lady of fashion; she accompanied her husband on his campaigns, and exhibited all the traditional virtues of a Roman matron before the enraptured eyes of the legionaries; she dressed up her youngest boy, Caius, in the full uniform of a Roman soldier, and got him the nickname of Caligula--Little Gaiters--in the camp. The Claudian stock was represented by Drusus, the son of Tiberius, a man slightly younger than Germanicus, whose sister he married, thus further interweaving the two lines; also by Germanicus himself and his brother Claudius, the unfortunate sputterer, of whom his own mother was ashamed, and whose family were united in a desire to keep him out of sight. In order further to knit up the dynastic web, Augustus adopted Tiberius, who in his turn adopted both his own nephew Germanicus and his stepson Agrippa Postumus. It is not improbable that the dynastic pretensions of this young man, stimulated by the example of his sister Agrippina, were the real cause of his enforced retreat, that he did not acquiesce willingly in his grandfather’s arrangements, and that the watchful Livia knew how to turn his insubordination to advantage. Augustus showed disturbing signs of a weakness in his direction in spite of his intractability.