I'm John Baxter with Daisy Dunn, a classicist who's done us a great favor of putting together the classical world

historically, chronologically, but the women are emphasized and there are parts in it, some spoken, most not,

but certainly after reading Daisy's work,

it's impossible to go back and just tell the story of Caesar. That is totally inadequate.

Motivation, drama. Now we come to Augustus, formerly Octavian. Not a warrior-looking young man.

However, a man who is Roman in the fashion that his wife

has a child and he announces her on the birthbed, I divorce you. And he takes up with a married woman,

or the woman who was married, she might be widowed, I don't remember. Her name is

Livia, and he takes up with her and stays with her the rest of his life. What do we need to know

about Libya? What, because Robert Graves turned her into a poisoner. No, I reject that, but what

was she, Daisy? Livia is incredibly interesting, another very clever, politically expedient woman.

She was actually forced to divorce her husband and to hand over her children to the ex-husband

in order to marry Augustus.

And she was there while he was turning essentially the Roman Republic into an empire,

who's the first person who is changing Roman politics for a very long time.

He has some precedent.

His great uncle, Julius Caesar, had really kind of rocked the boat.

But he's got to build a dynasty now.

And Libya has seemed to be essential to building that dynasty.

Unfortunately, Augustus and Livia don't manage to have children together, but she has two boys of her

own, and one of those boys is Tiberius. And Tiberius in time will be adopted by Emperor Augustus and become the next figure in this dynasty.

So Livia is key really to the establishment of the Roman Empire, the whole new system of rule.

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