ran the risk of being accused as a lover of Julia.  Several youths of high society, frightened by these charges, committed suicide; others were condemned.  About Julia were invented and spread the most atrocious calumnies, which formed thereafter the basis for the infamous legends that have remained in history attached to her name.  The traditionalist party naturally abetted this furor of accusations and inventions, made to persuade the public that a fearful corruption was hidden among the upper classes and that to cure it fire and sword must be used without pity.

The friends of Julia, the party of the young nobility, disconcerted at first by the explosion, did not delay to collect themselves and react; the populace of Rome made some great demonstrations in favour of Julia and demanded her pardon of Augustus.  Many indeed, recognising that her punishment was legal, protested against the ferocity of her enemies, who had not hesitated to embitter with so terrible a scandal the old age of Augustus; protested against the mad folly of incrimination with which every part of Rome was possessed.  Most people turned, the more envenomed, against Tiberius, attacking him with renewed fury as the cause of all the evil.  He it was, they insisted, who had conceived the abominable scandal, willed it, imposed it upon Rome and the Empire!

If Livia and the friends of Tiberius had thought to bring him in by the gate where Julia went out, they were not slow in recognising themselves deceived.  The fall of Julia struck Tiberius on the rebound in his distant island.  His unpopularity, already great, grew by all the disgust that the scandal about Julia had provoked, and became so formidable that one day about this time the inhabitants of Nimes overturned his statues.  It was the beginning of the Christian era, but a dark silence brooded over the Palatine; the defamed Julia was making her hard way to Pandataria; Tiberius, discredited and detested, was wasting himself in inaction at Rodi; Augustus in his empty house, disgusted, distrustful, half paralysed by deep grief, would hear to no counsels of peace, of indulgence, of reconciliation.  Tiberius and Julia were equally hateful to him, and as he did not allow himself to be moved by the friends of Julia, who did not cease to implore her pardon, so he resisted the friends of Tiberius, who tried to persuade him to reconciliation.  What mattered it to him if the administration of the State fell to pieces on all sides; if Germans threatened revolt; if Rome had need of the courage, of the valour, of the experience of Tiberius?

Tiberius from his retreat in Rodi kept every one in Rome afraid, beginning with Augustus.  Too rich, too eager now for pleasures and comforts, Rome was almost disgusted with the virtues and the defects that had in fact created it, and which survived in Tiberius—­aristocratic pride, the spirit of rigour in authority, military valour, simplicity.  Peace had come, extending everywhere, with wealth, the desire for enjoyment, happiness, pleasure, freedom, loosening everywhere the firmest bonds of social discipline, persuading Rome to lay down the heavy armour it had worn for so many centuries.