fond and whose memory the people still venerated.

[Illustration: Costume of a chief vestal (virgo vestalis maxima).]

After the retirement of Tiberius to Capri, all felt that Agrippina and
her sons were inevitably doomed sooner or later to succumb in the duel
with the powerful, ambitious, and implacable prefect of the pretorians
who represented Tiberius at Rome. Only a few generous idealists
remained faithful to the conquered, who were now near their
destruction; such supporters as might possibly ease the misery of ruin,
but not ward it off or avoid it. Among these last faithful and heroic
friends was a certain Titius Sabinus, and the implacable Sejanus
destroyed him with a suit of which Tacitus has given us an account, a
horrible story of one of the most abominable judicial machinations
which human perfidy can imagine. Dissensions arose to aggravate the
already serious danger in which Agrippina and her friends had been
placed. Nero, the first-born son, and Drusus, the second, became
hostile at the very moment when they should have united against the
ruthless adversary who wished to exterminate them all. A last rock of
refuge remained to protect the family of Germanicus. It was Livia, the
revered old lady who had been present at the birth of the fortunes of
Augustus and the new imperial authority, and who had held in her arms
that infant world which had been born in the midst of the convulsions
of the civil wars, and a little later had watched it try its first
steps on the pathway of history. Livia did not much love Agrippina,
whose hatred and intrigues against Tiberius she had always blamed; but
she was too wise and too solicitous of the prestige of the family to
allow Sejanus entirely to destroy the house of Germanicus. As long as
she lived, Agrippina and Nero could dwell safely in Rome. But Livia
was feeble, and in the beginning of 29, at the age of eighty-six, she