There was another and less sympathetic side to her character. Without imagination, and little touched with sentiment, her life seems to have been guided by a calm reason which was always at the service of a towering ambition--a trait which, sooner or later, is sure to make the gentlest man or woman hard and cruel toward any one who stands in its way. This ambition was her master passion, and in its direction lay her faults. To her judgment and discrimination was added the craft of a diplomatist. Her grandson Caligula called her a “Ulysses in petticoats.” That she had any hand in the singular falling away, one after another, of her husband’s direct heirs, or that she ever passed the point where intrigue becomes crime, is the purest surmise. She had too many enemies in his family, who feared and envied her, to escape calumny; but though many dark rumors were in the air, nothing was ever proved. One youth was ill and died in Gaul, another in the far East. It is too much to suppose that she could safely have helped them out of the world at that distance, even had she wished to do so. That she schemed long and successfully to raise her son Tiberius to the throne is certain. That he repaid her with a great deal of ingratitude is equally so. Perhaps he could not forget that it was her ambition which compelled him to send away his much-loved wife, Vipsania,--whom he could never meet afterward without tears,--to marry the already notorious Julia, for whom he had a distinct aversion. But no one then stopped to consider sensibilities. If Livia was sometimes hard and cruel, she lived in an age when people who did many kind and generous things had no hesitation in walking over a rival, crushing an enemy, or even courteously suggesting to a friend who became inconvenient that it would be wise for him to take himself out of the world. The man of to-day is content with crushing rivals and ruining enemies in the name of high-sounding virtues, but he has grown humane, and lets them live. The time when fierce ambitions drove innocent victims out of life is gone by. But we can judge people only by the standards of their own day, and there is much evidence that Livia surpassed those of her time in justice and compassion.