people. They could not possibly have forgotten the usurpation of
that prince upon their freedom, nor the violent methods which he had
used in the compassing of that vast design; they yet remembered his
proscriptions, and the slaughter of so many noble Romans their
defenders--amongst the rest, that horrible action of his when he
forced Livia from the arms of her husband (who was constrained to
see her married, as Dion relates the story), and, big with child as
she was, conveyed to the bed of his insulting rival. The same Dion
Cassius gives us another instance of the crime before mentioned--
that Cornelius Sisenna, being reproached in full senate with the
licentious conduct of his wife, returned this answer: that he had
married her by the counsel of Augustus (intimating, says my author,
that Augustus had obliged him to that marriage, that he might under
that covert have the more free access to her). His adulteries were
still before their eyes, but they must be patient where they had not
power. In other things that emperor was moderate enough; propriety
was generally secured, and the people entertained with public shows
and donatives, to make them more easily digest their lost liberty.
But Augustus, who was conscious to himself of so many crimes which
he had committed, thought in the first place to provide for his own
reputation by making an edict against lampoons and satires, and the
authors of those defamatory writings, which my author Tacitus, from
the law-term, calls famosos libellos.

In the first book of his Annals he gives the following account of it
in these words:- Primus Augustus cognitionem de famosis libellis,
specie legis ejus, tractavit; commotus Cassii Severi libidine, qua
viros faeminasque illustres procacibus scriptis diffamaverat. Thus
in English:- "Augustus was the first who, under the colour of that
law, took cognisance of lampoons, being provoked to it by the