150 * WIVES OF THE (LESAttS. 



gods. He had sacrified the inestimable bliss of married life, perhaps 

 to his ambition, perhaps to a mistaken sense of filial duty. In either 

 instance he was culpable. The rights of virtue in a wife are plain 

 and indefeasible. The subservience of Tiberius to the wishes or 

 command of Caesar, by which he parted from a consort, at once 

 affectionate and chaste, though not defensible on any natural or moral 

 plea, will lose a portion of its odium, if we recall the power which 

 custom universally asserts of reconciling error to a pliant conscience, 

 or at least of softening its repulsive features : and unjust repudiation 

 was common with the Roman people. It is impossible to say, if his 

 compliance with Augustus's desires arose from an ambitious motive. 

 If that incentive did exist, his acquiescence was a base departure from 

 the sacred principles of nature, of the received morality of almost 

 every age and country. If gratitude to his imperial benefactor, his 

 adoptive father, influenced his conduct, it proved him capable of 

 painful sacrifices in a cause of misconceived devotion; arrogated, it 

 is true, in Rome by the extensive privileges of paternity. It would 

 be hostile to morality to assume expedience as a suitable apology for 

 wrong ; no action of injustice, however qualified by partial virtue, 

 can be entitled to unqualified applause ; and the common sense of 

 human nature is sufficiently acute to see, that though a generous im- 

 pulse may extenuate an offence, no sacrifice can possibly be laudable 

 which involves the infringement of the rights of others. 



If any slight constraint existed on the wantonness of Julia, it 

 ceased on the departure of Tiberius from Rome ; and possibly the 

 distance of this chosen place of exile inspired her with that audacious 

 confidence in the impunity of her offences, which she manifested so 

 immediately on his secession. Her ungovernable passions assumed 

 the character of constitutional disease, and urged her into every 

 species of indiscriminate and vulgar prostitution. Her acts were 

 neither veiled beneath the semblance of external decency, nor does it 

 seem that any momentary sentiment in favour of a present paramour, 

 induced her to prevent his knowledge of her general licentiousness. 

 Dion Cassius and Xiphilinus, severally mention " the adulterous 

 flocks" that thronged in the apartments of the princess. Her nights 

 were passed in lewd perambulations of the streets of Rome ; the very 

 tribune of harangues from which her father's laws against adultery 

 had been proclaimed, was irreverently chosen as the spot of her dis- 

 graceful commerce ; and with a refinement in effrontery, which it is 

 painful and degradingto our nature to believe, she enumerated the trans- 

 gressions of the previous night by garlands found upon the morrow on 

 the forensic statue of the Phrygian Marsyas.* The long career of her 

 debaucheries, so flagrantly notorious in Rome, had hitherto proceeded 

 with impunity : and Augustus, who was carefully informed of every 

 event of importance at the extremities of the empire, was still a 

 stranger to the criminal excesses of his daughter. The characters of 

 her habitual associates eventually roused the vigilance, if they did 



* " Cujus statuain foro erat, et ad earn tribunal. Itaque coronare Marsyam 

 victores solent, et qui causas tenuissent. At haec muliercula (Julia) libidinum 

 coronas^ et pugnarum numeros, imponebat." Plin. 1. 21. cap. 3. 



