But the woman?  If she is freed from family cares, if she is authorized to live for her own gratification and for her beauty; if the opinion that imposes upon her, on pain of infamy, habits pure and honest, weakens; if, instead of infamy, dissoluteness brings her glory, riches, homage, what trammel can still restrain in her the selfish instincts latent in every human being?  She runs the mighty danger of changing into an irresponsible being who will be the more admired and courted and possessed of power—­at least as long as her beauty lasts—­the more she ignores every duty, subordinating all good sense to her own pleasure.

This is the reason why woman, in periods commanded by strong social discipline, is the most beneficent and tenacious among the cohesive forces of a nation; and why, in times when social discipline is relaxed, she is, instead, through ruinous luxury, dissipation, and voluntary sterility, the most terrible force for dissolution.

[Illustration:  The sister of M. Nonius Balbus.]

One of the greatest problems of every epoch and all civilizations is to find a balance between the natural aspiration for freedom that is none other than the need of personal felicity—­a need as lively and profound in the heart of woman as of man—­and the supreme necessity for a discipline without which the race, the state, and the family run the gravest danger.  Yet this problem to-day, in the unmeasured exhilaration with which riches and power intoxicate the European-American civilization, is considered with the superficial frivolity and the voluble dilettantism that despoil or confuse all the great problems of esthetics, philosophy, statesmanship, and morality.  We live in the midst of what might be called the Saturnalia of the world’s history; and in the midst of the swift and easy labor, the inebriety of our continual festivities, we feel no more the tragic in life.  This short history of the women of the Caesars will set before the eyes of this pleasure-loving contemporary age tragedies among whose ruins our ancestors lived from birth to death, and by which they tempered their minds.

II

LIVIA AND JULIA

In the year 38 B.C. it suddenly became known at Rome that C. Julius Caesar Octavianus (afterward the Emperor Augustus), one of the triumvirs of the republic, and colleague of Mark Antony and Lepidus in the military dictatorship established after the death of Caesar, had sent up for decision to the pontifical college, the highest religious authority of the state, a curious question.  It was this:  Might a divorced woman who was expecting to become a mother contract a marriage with another man before the birth of her child?  The pontifical college replied that if there still was doubt about the fact the new marriage would not be permissible; but if it was certain, there would be no impediment.  A few days later, it was learned that Octavianus had divorced his wife Scribonia and had married Livia, a young woman of nineteen.  Livia’s physical condition was precisely that concerning which the pontiffs had been asked to decide, and in order to enter into this marriage she had obtained a divorce from Tiberius Claudius Nero.