always constrained in a certain measure
to check his selfish instincts by the need of conserving, enlarging, and
defending against rivals his social, economic, and political situation.
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.
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
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