The two divorces and the new marriage were concluded with unwonted haste.  The first husband of Livia, acting the part of a father, gave her a dowry for her new alliance and was present at the wedding.  Thus Livia suddenly passed into the house of her new husband where, three months later, she gave birth to a son, who was called Drusus Claudius Nero.  This child Octavianus immediately sent to the house of its father.

To us, marriage customs of this sort seem brutal, shameless, and almost ridiculous.  We should infer that a woman who lent herself to such barter and exchange must be a person of light manners and of immoral inclinations.  At Rome, however, no one would have been amazed at such a marriage or at the procedure adopted, had it not been for the extraordinary haste, which seemed to indicate that it was undesirable or impossible to wait until Livia should have given birth to her child, and which made it necessary to trouble the pontifical college for its somewhat sophistical consent.  For all were accustomed to seeing the marriages of great personages made and unmade in this manner and on such bases.  Why, then, were these nuptials so precipitately concluded, apparently with the consent of all concerned?  Why did they all, Livia and Octavianus not less than Tiberius Claudius Nero, seem so impatient that everything should be settled with despatch?

[Illustration:  Livia, the mother of Tiberius, in the costume of a priestess.]

The legend which then formed about the family of Augustus, a legend hostile at almost every point, has interpreted this marriage as a tyrannical act, virtually an abduction, by the dissolute and perverse triumvir.  I, too, in my “Greatness and Decline of Rome” expressed my belief that this haste, at least, was the effect not of political motives but of a passionate love inspired in the young triumvir by the very beautiful Livia.  A longer reflection upon this episode has persuaded me, however, that there is another manner, less poetic perhaps, but more Roman, of explaining, at least in part, this famous alliance, which was to have so great an importance in the history of Rome.

To arrive at the motives of this marriage we must consider who was Livia and who was Octavianus.  Livia was a woman of great beauty, as her portraits prove.  But this was not all.  She belonged also to two of the most ancient and conspicuous families of the Roman nobility.  Her father, Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus, was by birth a Claudius, adopted by a Livius Drusus.  He was descended from Appius the Blind, the famous censor and perhaps the most illustrious personage of the ancient republic.  His grandfather, his great-grand-father, and his great-great-grandfather had been consuls, and consuls and censors may be found in the collateral branches of the family.  A sister of his grandfather had been the wife of Tiberius Gracchus; a cousin of his father had married Lucullus, the great general.