was the base of his prestige. The moment was terrible. Imagine this old man of sixty-two wearied by forty-four years of public life, embittered by the difficulties that sprang up about him, disquieted by the dissolution of State of which he was the impotent witness, finding himself all at once facing these alternatives—either destroy his daughter, or undo all the political work over which he had laboured for thirty years; and no temporising possible!
Augustus was not a naturally cruel man, but before these alternatives his mind seems to have been for a moment convulsed by an access of grief and rage, the distant echo of which has come down to us. One moment, as Suetonius says, he had the idea of killing Julia. Then reason, pity, affection, gentler habits, prevailed. He did not give the sentence of death, but he was too practised a politician not to understand that she could not be saved; and as he had immolated Cicero, Lepidus, Antony, so he immolated her also to the necessity of preserving before Italy his prestige of severe legislator and impartial magistrate. To avoid the trial, he resolved to punish her himself with his power of pater familias according to the lex Julia, exiling her to Pandataria and announcing the divorce to her in the
