II

Who was Quintus Livius Drusus? Doubtless he would have felt highly
insulted if his family history had not been fairly well known to every
respectable person around Præneste and to a very large and select
circle at Rome. When a man could take Livius[13] for his gentile name,
and Drusus for his cognomen, he had a right to hold his head high, and
regard himself as one of the noblest and best of the imperial city.
But of course the Drusian house had a number of branches, and the
history of Quintus's direct family was this. He was the grandson of
that Marcus Livius Drusus[14] who, though an aristocrat of the
aristocrats, had dared to believe that the oligarchs were too strong,
the Roman Commons without character, and that the Italian freemen were
suffering from wrongs inflicted by both of the parties at the capital.
For his efforts to right the abuses, he had met with a reward very
common to statesmen of his day, a dagger-thrust from the hand of an
undiscovered assassin. He had left a son, Sextus, a man of culture and
talent, who remembered his father's fate, and walked for a time warily
in politics. Sextus had married twice. Once to a very noble lady of
the Fabian gens, the mother of his son Quintus. Then some years after
her death he took in marriage a reigning beauty, a certain Valeria,
who soon developed such extravagance and frivolity, that, soon after
she bore him a daughter, he was forced "to send her a messenger"; in
other words, to divorce her. The daughter had been put under the
guardianship of Sextus's sister-in-law Fabia, one of the Vestal
virgins at Rome. Sextus himself had accepted an appointment to a
tribuneship in a legion of Cæsar in Gaul. When he departed for the
wars he took with him as fellow officer a life-long friend, Caius
Cornelius Lentulus; and ere leaving for the campaign the two had
formed a compact quite in keeping with the stern Roman spirit that