Read Online Tiberius by Ernst Mason - Free Book Online

she was loved by half the men in Rome—because she was meant to be loved.
    Around the women conflicting parties formed. Livia, with Tiberius and the Romans of good old family and position, took the side of decency, order, tradition. Julia's circle was the young, hard-living set. The Emperor was somewhere in between. When Livia was with him he could thunder against immorality, pass laws against adultery, forbid the waste of money on foolish frills. When Julia was with him he could see nothing but Julia.
    Tiberius seethed, suffered, and went out to fight wars. He was a good general, though a plodder, and he usually won, but even more important, this kept him from tangling with Julia. That suited Julia very well. -
    It was all fun to Julia. She would have got along very well with Mark Antony. Too bad that the Inimitable Liver died before her time. A change in husbands made no change-in Julia's ways. She flirted and flighted on a grander scale than before. Tiberius mourned.
    Once, in Rome between battl es, he happened to meet Vipsania at the home of a friend.
    She was lost to him forever—Augustus could not have her left available, so he arranged her remarriage immediately to Asinius Gallus, a fine Senator—but Tiberius fell dumb when he saw her. His awkward, hesitant speech dried up entirely. It was embarrassing to everyone; Vipsania left, as gracefully as she could, but Tiberius followed her through die streets, weeping.
    The Emperor heard about it, and frowned. He disliked the scandal. No one had dared tell him, quite, about the scandals of his own daughter. He knew she was light-hearted, but he didn't know that she was seen carousing drunkenly through the streets late at night. The Emperor called in Tiberius and laid down the law: As he couldn't control himself, he was never to see Vipsania again.
    Of course, Tiberius could have ended his troubles at any time, if he chose. There was a remedy in law close at hand.
    With Livia behind him, Augustus himself had put forth a law to control adultery. It was not his only attempt to reform Roman morals—he had legislated against extravagant dress and other wastes—but this law had more teeth in it than the others.
    The la w was called "the Julian Law on a dultery"—named after Julia herself, joked the scurrilous gossips. But it wasn't. It was named after the family of Augustus, the Julian family. It provided severe penalties for unchaste wives, and even for their lovers. It proclaimed the responsibility of the husband to denounce his erring wife to the courts; and if the husband failed to do so within sixty days, it became the duty of the adulteress's father. If the father likewise failed, any Roman could bring the miscreant to justice.
    How Tiberius must have hoped that some Roman would!
    The law was there. Why didn't someone use it? But no one did, for the same reasons that bound Tiberius. Julia was the daughter of one Emperor, and it was all but certain that she would be the mother of the next. The law could be used to crush her, but the man who wielded it would earn the sure hatred of the mightiest men in Rome.
    Tiberius' best escape was war. He went to Germany, and in a long, bloody campaign finished the work his brother had started. But victory brought him only glory. He was still young enough.—and he was still human enough—to want happiness. But that was gone. Tiberius reached majesty before he died, but the golden years of simple, human pleasures were already behind him.
    If war gave Tiberius a job to take his mind off his troubles, it gave Julia something too. It gave her more freedom than before.
    Not privacy; she could never have that, for it did not exist in Rome. All of Rome's intrigues and adulteries were carried on in a noonday brightness of publicity, always. Every Roman home of the upper class was crammed with people. One cannot own a thousand slaves and ever get very far from slave eyes and ears. Besides the slaves, there were the "clients"— the