instead, was unpopular.  However, there is no undertaking impossible to party hate.  Exasperated by the growing disfavour of public opinion, the party of Tiberius decided on a desperate expedient to which Tiberius himself would not have dared set hand; that is, since Julia had a paramour, to adopt against her the weapon supplied by the lex Julia de adulteriis, made by her father, and so provoke the terrible scandal that until then every one had avoided in fear.

Unfortunately, we possess too few documents to write in detail the history of this dreadful episode; but everything becomes clear enough if one sees in the ruin of Julia a kind of terrible political and judicial blackmailing, tried by the friends of Tiberius to remove the chief obstacle to his return, and if one takes it that the friends of Tiberius succeeded in procuring proofs of the guilt of Julia and carried them to Augustus, not as to the head of the State, but to the father.

Dion Cassius says that “Augustus finally, although tardily, came to recognise the misdeeds of his daughter,” which signifies that at a given moment, Augustus could no longer feign ignorance of her sins, because the proofs were in the power of irreconcilable enemies, who would have refused to smother the scandal.  These mortal enemies of Julia could have been no other than the friends of Tiberius.  Julia had violated the law on adultery made by himself; Augustus could doubt it no more.

To understand well the tragic situation in which Augustus was placed by these revelations, one must remember various things:  first that the lex de adulteriis, proposed by Augustus himself, obliged the father—­when the husband could not, or would not—­to punish the guilty daughter, or to denounce her to the praetor, if he had not the courage to punish her himself; second, that this law arranged that if the father and the husband failed to fulfil their proper duty, any one whoever, the first comer, might in the name of public morals make the denunciation to the praetor and stand to accuse the woman and her accomplice.  Tiberius, the husband, being absent at Rodi, he, Augustus, the father, must become the Nemesis of his daughter—­must punish her or denounce her; if not, the friends of Tiberius could accuse her to the praetor, hale her before the quaestor, unveil to the public the shame of her private life.

What should he do?  Many a father had disdainfully refused to be the executioner of his own daughter, leaving to others the grim office of applying the lex Julia.  Could he imitate such an example?  He was the head of the Republic, the most powerful man of the Empire, the founder of a new political order; he could decide peace and war, govern the Senate at his pleasure, exalt or abase the powerful of the earth with a nod; and exactly for this reason he dared not evade the bitter task.  He feared the envy, the moral and levelling prejudices of the middle classes, which needed every now and then to slaughter in the