Summary

In the next of Julia’s journal entries, she writes of the importance of succession to Roman life. Every man Octavius has married her to has been in pursuit of proper lines of succession; now, however, no males of the Octavian line remain, and thus Julia is married to Livia’s son Tiberius, who, by all accounts, is a menace. The couple has a child together within a year, but the child dies within a week of his birth. Tiberius and Julia live apart from this point onward.

There follows a letter from Ovid to Sextus Properius, written in 10 B.C. At this point, Ovid writes, Julia has been missing from their social circle for more than a year, and her friends miss her presence.

In a letter to Tiberius Claudius Nero written in 9 B.C., Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso writes that, as...