What was the cause of all this? we ask. How were so many catastrophes possible, and how could tradition have erred so grievously? It is almost a crime that posterity should virtually always have studied and pondered this immense tragedy of history on the basis of the crude and superficial falsification of it which Tacitus has given us. For few episodes in general history impress so powerfully upon the mind the fact that the progress of the world is one of the most tragic of its phenomena. Especially is such knowledge necessary to the favored generations of prosperous and easy times. He who has not lived in those years when an old world is disappearing and a new one making its way cannot realize the tragedy of life, for at such times the old is still sufficiently strong to resist the assaults of the new, and the latter, though growing, is not yet strong enough to annihilate that world on the ruins of which alone it will be able to prosper. Men are then called upon to solve insoluble problems and to attempt enterprises which are both necessary and impossible. There is confusion everywhere, in the mind within and in the world without. Hate often separates those who ought to aid one another, since they are tending toward the same goal, and sympathy binds men together who are forced to do battle with one another. At such times women generally suffer more than men, for every change which occurs in their situation seems more dangerous, and it is right that it should be so. For woman is by nature the vestal of our species, and for that reason she must be more conservative, more circumspect, and more virtuous than man. There is no state or civilization which has comprehended the highest things in life which has not been forced to instil into its women rather than into its men the sense for all those virtues upon which depend the stability of the family and the future of the race. And for every era this is a question of life and death. In such periods when one world is dying and another coming to birth, all conceptions become confused, and all attempts bring forth bizarre results. He who wishes to preserve, often destroys, so that virtue seems vice, and vice seems virtue. Precisely for this reason it is more difficult for a woman than for a man to succeed in fulfilling her proper mission, for she is more exposed to the danger of losing her way and of missing her particular function; and since she is more likely to fail in realizing her natural destiny, she is more likely to be doomed to a life of misfortune.
Such was the fate of the family of Augustus, and such especially was the fate of its women. The strangers who visit Rome often go out on Sunday afternoons to listen to the excellent music that can be heard in a room which is situated in one of the little streets near the Piazza del Popolo and which used to be called the Corea. This hall was built over an ancient Roman ruin of circular form which any one can still see as he enters. That ruin is the entrance to the tomb which Augustus built on the Flaminian Way for himself and his family. Nearly all of the personages whose story we have told were buried in that mausoleum. If any reader who has followed this history should one day find himself at Rome, listening to a concert in that old Corea, which has now been renamed after the Emperor Augustus, let him give a thought to those victims of a terrible story of long ago, and may he remember that here, where at the beginning of the twentieth century he listens to the flow of rivers of sweet sound—here only, twenty centuries ago, could the members of the family of Augustus find refuge from their tragic fate, and after so much greatness, resolved to dust and ashes, rest at last in peace.