forces of a nation; and why, in times when social discipline is
relaxed, she is, instead, through ruinous luxury, dissipation, and
voluntary sterility, the most terrible force for dissolution.

[Illustration: The sister of M. Nonius Balbus.]

One of the greatest problems of every epoch and all civilizations is to
find a balance between the natural aspiration for freedom that is none
other than the need of personal felicity--a need as lively and profound
in the heart of woman as of man--and the supreme necessity for a
discipline without which the race, the state, and the family run the
gravest danger. Yet this problem to-day, in the unmeasured
exhilaration with which riches and power intoxicate the
European-American civilization, is considered with the superficial
frivolity and the voluble dilettantism that despoil or confuse all the
great problems of esthetics, philosophy, statesmanship, and morality.
We live in the midst of what might be called the Saturnalia of the
world's history; and in the midst of the swift and easy labor, the
inebriety of our continual festivities, we feel no more the tragic in
life. This short history of the women of the Caesars will set before
the eyes of this pleasure-loving contemporary age tragedies among whose
ruins our ancestors lived from birth to death, and by which they
tempered their minds.




II

LIVIA AND JULIA