Octavia no doubt had her little foibles, though it is not at all certain that this step was due to one of them; but she did not forget the duties of her position. She had wide fame as a loyal, charitable, self-sacrificing, and virtuous woman. In the spirit of the new age, she patronized talent, and gave a public library to the portico which Augustus had built in her honor, filling it with valuable paintings of classical subjects. In the failure of her hopes and the loss of her illusions, she still devoted herself to the children of Antony as well as her own, and interested herself in arranging suitable marriages for them. But these things failed to bring consolation to a bruised heart, or serenity in the troubles that had fallen upon her. She shut herself from the world after her last humiliations, and died of her griefs at fifty-four, revered and idolized by the Roman people, who resented her wrongs as much as they pitied her sufferings. But the son she never ceased to mourn had been in his tomb many a year, and the fickle husband who deserted her had ended his career in disgrace long before. She did not live to see the downfall of Julia, the death of her august brother, or the final triumph of Livia. She was spared, too, the misfortunes that befell some of the children of her love and care. The details of Octavia’s life are few and meager. Fate gave her a prominent part to play on the world’s stage, and she played it well, but with an evident longing to fall back upon her affections. She was never a woman of initiative, but she was clearly one of moral force, framed to temper the friction of more powerful individualities, but to be herself crushed in their collisions. She stands for the purest and most gracious type of Roman womanhood. Many were stronger, many were more brilliant, but few left a memory so fragrant or so sweet. III There was another woman in the household of Augustus, who represented the new age on its worst and most dangerous side. In Julia we have the woman who lived to amuse herself, and left a name which has become a synonym for the appalling corruption of Roman society. No one was placed so high, no one fell so low; and no one has been so often quoted to “point a moral or adorn a tale.” But it has often been the wrong moral and the wrong tale. Bred austerely for a throne, versed in all the culture of her time, this brilliant, haughty, impetuous daughter of the emperor led the fast set at Rome for a few years, dazzled the world with her wit and her toilets, shocked it with her escapades, only to sink at last from her lofty pedestal to untold depths of infamy and a living tomb.