herself without difficulty to all the sacrifices which her rank and situation imposed upon her.  She changed husbands without repugnance, though her marriage to Octavianus occurred but five years after the proscriptions, while he was still red with the blood of her family and friends.  Likewise she renounced her two sons, the future emperor Tiberius, who had been born before her second marriage, as well as the one who had been born after.  So too when, a few years later, Tiberius Claudius Nero died, appointing Augustus their guardian, with equal serenity she took them back and educated them with the most careful motherly solicitude.  To the second husband, whom politics had given her, she was a faithful companion.  Scandal imputed to her absurd poisonings which she did not commit, and accused her of insatiable ambitions and perfidious intrigues.  No one ever dared accuse her of infidelity to Augustus or of dissolute conduct.  The great fame, power, and wealth of her husband did not disturb the calm poise of her spirit.  In that palace of Augustus, adorned with triumphal laurel, toward which the eyes of the subjects were turned from every part of the empire, in that palace where, in little councils with the most eminent men of the senate, were debated the supreme interests of the world,—­laws and elections, wars and peace,—­she preserved the beautiful traditions of simplicity and industry.  These she had learned as a child in the house of her father,—­a house as much more illustrious with inherited glory as it was poorer in wealth than that which Victory had prepared for Augustus on the Palatine.

[Illustration:  The young Augustus.]

We know—­it is Suetonius who tells us—­that this house on the Palatine built by Augustus, in which Livia spent the larger part of her life, was small and not at all luxurious.  In it there was not a single piece of marble nor a precious mosaic; for forty years Augustus slept in the same bedchamber, and the furniture of the house was so simple that in the second century of our era it was exhibited to the public as an extraordinary curiosity.  The imperial pair had several villas, at Lanuvium, at Palestrina, at Tivoli, but all of them were unpretentious and simple.  Nor was there any more pomp and ceremony about the dinners to which they invited the conspicuous personages of Rome, the dignitaries of the state and the heads of the great families.  Only on very special occasions were six courses served; usually there were but three.  Moreover, Augustus never wore any other togas than those woven by Livia; woven not indeed and altogether by Livia’s hands,—­though she did not disdain, now and then, to work the loom,—­but by her slaves and freed-women.  Faithful to the traditions of the aristocracy, Livia counted it among her duties personally to direct the weaving-rooms which were in the house.  As she carefully parceled out the wool to the slaves, watching over them lest they steal or waste it, and frequently taking her place among them while they were at work, she felt that she too contributed to the prosperity and the glory of the empire.