r with a respect and a sympathy that made her
almost invulnerable. Tiberius, instead, was unpopular. However, there
is no undertaking impossible to party hate. Exasperated by the growing
disfavour of public opinion, the party of Tiberius decided on a
desperate expedient to which Tiberius himself would not have dared set
hand; that is, since Julia had a paramour, to adopt against her the
weapon supplied by the _lex Julia de adulteriis_, made by her father,
and so provoke the terrible scandal that until then every one had
avoided in fear.

Unfortunately, we possess too few documents to write in detail the
history of this dreadful episode; but everything becomes clear enough
if one sees in the ruin of Julia a kind of terrible political and
judicial blackmailing, tried by the friends of Tiberius to remove the
chief obstacle to his return, and if one takes it that the friends
of Tiberius succeeded in procuring proofs of the guilt of Julia and
carried them to Augustus, not as to the head of the State, but to the
father.

Dion Cassius says that "Augustus finally, although tardily, came to
recognise the misdeeds of his daughter," which signifies that at a
given moment, Augustus could no longer feign ignorance of her sins,
because the proofs were in the power of irreconcilable enemies, who
would have refused to smother the scandal. These mortal enemies of
Julia could have been no other than the friends of Tiberius. Julia had
violated the law on adultery made by himself; Augustus could doubt it
no more.

To understand well the tragic situation in which Augustus was placed
by these revelations, one must remember various things: first that
the _lex de adulteriis_, proposed by Augustus himself, obliged the
father--when the husband could not, or would not--to punish the guilty
daughter, or to denounce her to the praetor, if he had not the courage
to punish her himself; second, that this law arranged that if the
father and the husband failed to fulfil their proper duty, any one
whoever, the first comer, might in the name of public morals make
the denunciation to the praetor and stand to accuse the woman and her
accomplice. Tiberius, the husband, being absent at Rodi, he, Augustus,
the father, must become the Nemesis of his daughter--must punish her
or denounce her; if not, the friends of Tiberius could accuse her
to the praetor, hale her before the quaestor, unveil to the public the
shame of her private life.

What should he do?