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But the interference of Livia annoyed Tiberius, and the ten years that follow are full of differences between mother and son. The Emperor’s resentment of his mother’s share in public affairs had begun with his reign. Livia had proposed to erect a statue to the memory of Octavian. Tiberius interfered, and referred her to the Senate for permission. She then proposed to give a commemoratory banquet to the Senators and their wives. Tiberius restricted her to the wives, and entertained the Senators himself. He reduced her escort, frowned on the public honours that were paid to her, and resented her interference in public affairs. On one occasion her friend Urgulania was summoned for debt, and, presuming on her intimacy with the Empress, treated the process with contempt. Livia asked Tiberius to quash the proceedings, and he deliberately lingered so much on his way to the Forum that the case was allowed to proceed.

These are a few of the stories which illustrate the want of harmony between them. For this Livia was largely to blame. It was not unnatural that she, who had been so often and so profitably consulted by Octavian, should expect a larger power under the young Emperor, but she failed to take discreet account of the extreme sensitiveness of Tiberius. If a story given in Suetonius is correct, she so far lost her discretion in one of their quarrels as to produce old letters in which Octavian had made bitter reflections on the defects of Tiberius. The fault was not wholly on her side, however. Tiberius was jealous when he contrasted the honour and respect paid to her with the general feeling of reserve and distrust toward himself, and he pleaded the old-fashioned idea of woman’s sphere as a pretext to restrain her. He grumbled when he one day found her directing the extinction of a fire, as she had done more than once in Octavian’s time, and he was seriously angry when he found that she had placed her name before his on a public inscription.