Duty to the family, duty to the State, or it might be first duty to the State, then duty to the family, were impressed upon the young Roman noble as the conditions of his existence; he lived, like the heir-apparent to a throne, in a court which forced upon him the traditions and observances which the maintenance of the court demanded. If the father neglected his children, and evaded the responsibility of training them, there were numerous other persons ready and willing to undertake his work. The presiding genius of a Roman family was not infrequently an aged lady, or a trusted freedman, deeply imbued with the importance of the house and the sanctity of its traditions. For the first nine years of his life Tiberius lived with his father--a man serious, fond of learning, full of the republican tradition. It is not impossible that, in spite of the association with Octavian through Livia, the house was to some extent a meeting place of the remnant of the Republican party. We at least know that one of these men made the young Tiberius his heir, and adopted him by his will; he seems to have been allowed to take the succession, but had to refuse the adoption, because his benefactor was anti-Cæsarian. The elder Tiberius, not being engaged in public business, would have plenty of time to give to his children, and Roman children in a Roman family of the old-fashioned type were much with their parents. We are told that Tiberius was very carefully educated; at his father’s death he was already sufficiently well advanced in recitation to pronounce the customary eulogy at his funeral. Up to this time everything in his surroundings would tend to encourage a naturally severe temperament; it can hardly have been a cheerful home, this house of the lost cause. The affections of the boy expanded themselves upon his brother Drusus, his junior by more than two years, to whom his attachment was deep and lasting. On the death of their father the two boys were transferred to the care of their mother and stepfather, who was now their guardian. Tiberius was old enough to resent such an arrangement, but there is no evidence that he did so; he accepted his stepfather loyally, and Octavian himself was scrupulously careful of the interests of his stepsons. Diplomatic divorces and re-marriages were of such common occurrence in the Roman houses at this period that no slight was felt or intended, and as a rule the divorced parties maintained friendly relations. Octavia, the sister of Octavian, was neglected and eventually repudiated by Antonius, but she nevertheless took good care of his children by a former marriage, the children of the tigress Fulvia.