ABSTRACT
When Julia lost her second husband Agrippa in the spring of 12 BCE after almost ten years of marriage, she was already mother of four children and expecting his posthumous child. She had fully earned the honoured status and privileges of a ‘mother of three’ (ius trium liberorum) and would have been exempt from any coercion to remarry, had she been any other father’s child. But the Princeps’ only daughter could not be left unmarried. There were too many ambitious noblemen who would see marrying her as the key to manipulating power if Augustus should die and the succession fall to his ‘sons’ (really the sons of Julia and Agrippa) Gaius and Lucius, now aged eight and five. It would surely have been better for everyone concerned had Augustus married her off to a wealthy private person without political ambitions such as his friend Proculeius,1 but he was more concerned with marking out the right person to hold authority in the State than the right man to marry Julia. Instead, he chose Livia’s older son, Tiberius, already experienced in both warfare and senatorial business. This decision of the Princeps was, if anything, more cruel to his future son-in-law than to his daughter, for Tiberius greatly loved his wife, Agrippa’s eldest daughter, Vipsania Agrippina, the mother of his son (Drusus), and now pregnant with his second child.2 Suetonius (Tiberius 7.2) reports that after Tiberius had been forced to divorce her in order to marry Julia, he once accidentally saw Vipsania in the street and gazed after her with such longing and distress that efforts were made to make sure they did not meet again.
