LIVIA DRUSILLA, dro-silla, wife of the Roman Emperor Augustus: b. about 55 B.C.; d. 29 A.D. She was the daughter of L. Livius Drusus Claudianus, who committed suicide after the battle of Philippi. Livia be came the wife of Tiberius Claudius Nero, by whom she had two sons, Tiberius the future emperor, and Drusus. While still pregnant with the latter she was married to Octavianus (Augustus), who had been captivated by her beauty and her talent, and who to bring about this union had divorced Scribonia, and forced Tiberius Nero to divorce Livia. The union with Augustus seems to have been a happy one, but there is a suspicion that Livia's ambition to secure the succession for her own sons caused her to commit many crimes in order to remove the members of the family of Augustus, to whom the succession would naturally have fallen. Thus the death of Marcellus, nephew of Augustus, and of Lucius and Gaius Caesar, sons of Agrippa, was charged to her machina tions, nor was she free from the suspicion of having hastened the end of Augustus himself.
Meantime her surviving son, Tiberius, had been adopted by Augustus, who designated Livia and Tiberius as his principal heirs. On her son's succession to the imperial dignity Livia con tinued for a long time to exercise great in fluence, so much so that at first it seems to have been felt that Tiberius was subservient to her will; but in fact Tiberius, while con siderate of his mother, always maintained an attitude of independence toward her in all affairs of state, and thus by degrees a spirit of alienation grew up between them which in creased so much with years that Tiberius re fused to visit her on her death-bed, or even to execute the directions of her will. She died at an advanced age. Consult Tiibker, Frederich, 'Reallexikon des klassischen Altertums' (Vol. II, 8th ed., Leipzig 1914).