courts some one belonging to the upper classes, in order to delude themselves that justice is equal for all.  To him had been granted the greatest privileges; but precisely on this account was it dangerous to try to cover his daughter with a privileged protection as prey too delicate for public attack.  And then, if he himself gave the example of disobeying his law, who would observe it?  The tremendous scandal would unnerve all the moral force of his legislation, which was the base of his prestige.  The moment was terrible.  Imagine this old man of sixty-two wearied by forty-four years of public life, embittered by the difficulties that sprang up about him, disquieted by the dissolution of State of which he was the impotent witness, finding himself all at once facing these alternatives—­either destroy his daughter, or undo all the political work over which he had laboured for thirty years; and no temporising possible!

Augustus was not a naturally cruel man, but before these alternatives his mind seems to have been for a moment convulsed by an access of grief and rage, the distant echo of which has come down to us.  One moment, as Suetonius says, he had the idea of killing Julia.  Then reason, pity, affection, gentler habits, prevailed.  He did not give the sentence of death, but he was too practised a politician not to understand that she could not be saved; and as he had immolated Cicero, Lepidus, Antony, so he immolated her also to the necessity of preserving before Italy his prestige of severe legislator and impartial magistrate.  To avoid the trial, he resolved to punish her himself with his power of pater familias according to the lex Julia, exiling her to Pandataria and announcing the divorce to her in the name of Tiberius.  He then despatched to the Senate a record of what he had done, and went away to the country, where he remained a long time, says Suetonius, seeing no one, the prey to profound grief.

It seems that Julia’s fall was a surprise to the public.  In a day it learned that the highly popular daughter of Augustus had been condemned to exile by her father.  This unexpected revelation let a storm loose in the metropolis.  Even though there were not then published in Rome those vile newspapers, the pests of modern civilisation, that hunt their soldi in the mud and slime of the basest human passions, the taste for scandalous revelations, the envy of genius and fortune, the pleasure of wreaking cruelty upon the unarmed, the low delight in pouring the basest feelings upon the honour of a woman abandoned by all—­these passions animated minds then, as they do to-day; nor were there then wanting, more than now, wretches that profited by them, to gather money or satisfy bad instincts, without being able to dispose of a single, miserable sheet of paper.  On every side delators sprang up, and an epidemic of slanders embittered Rome; every man who had name or wealth or some relation with the family of Augustus,