Читать книгу The Empresses of Rome онлайн

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At this juncture, in the year 29, saddened by the estrangement from her son, by his helpless surrender to an unscrupulous adventurer, and by the increasing degeneration of Rome, Livia died. She had, by sober living—Pliny adds, by the constant chewing of a sweetmeat containing a certain medicinal root, and by the use of Pucinian wine—attained the great age of eighty-six. She had seen her husband dispel the long horrors of civil war, refresh the Empire, and adorn Rome; and she had felt the gloom and chill of a coming tragedy in her later years. Few of the Empresses have been so differently estimated as Livia. Merivale regards her as “a memorable example of successful artifice, having obtained in succession, by craft if not by crime, every object she could desire in the career of female ambition.” He adds: “But she had long survived every genuine attachment she may at any time have inspired, nor has a single voice been raised by posterity to supply the want of honest eulogium in her own day.”6