Of this society Julia was the center, the life, and the inspiration. The days were past when the stern father put a man of high lineage peremptorily in his place for presuming to address her in the beautiful city by the sea. The complaisant husband, absorbed in affairs, no doubt thought it best to let her go her own way, but he died possibly unsuspecting. Again the still youthful widow was married in the interest of the State and of Livia--to Livia’s son. The brooding, gloomy student was equally far from filling the heart of the graceful woman who was overflowing with the joy of life, and intoxicated with a sense of power that knows no law. Livia may have been faulty enough, but she was above the degradation of the senses. In Julia the virtues of the Roman matron seem to have been lost. When her conduct came to the knowledge of her inflexible father, he was as bitter as he had been tender. Her maid hung herself, and Augustus only said: “I would rather be the father of Phœbe than of Julia.” Of the youth entangled with her, some were exiled and some took themselves out of a world that was no longer possible for them. Among the latter was the clever, fascinating, but dissolute son of Antony, who had been carefully reared by Octavia and befriended by the emperor, only to repay their kindness by striking both in the tenderest point. But Julia, the beautiful, brilliant, flattered queen of society, was sent away from all her pleasures, her luxuries, her gay companions, her matchless position, to languish for fifteen years in a desolate exile, with no friend but the mother who shared with her the bare necessaries of a squalid existence. No wine, no luxury, no fine clothes, no men-servants without special restrictions and surveillance. A rock for a home, the sea and the sky for companions, and not even hope for consolation. And she was little past thirty-five! Once she was removed to a stronghold of Calabria, with a larger guard and no added comforts, but a little less severity. Many times the Roman people, who had loved her buoyant spirit and winning personality, begged her inexorable father to forgive her. “I wish you all had such daughters and such wives,” was his only reply. She died shortly after her father, to lie, unsung and forgotten, far from her kindred in an unknown grave. Not a word is left to tell us the details of that long tragedy. Her daughter Julia inherited her vices and suffered a like fate. IV