Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/662

648 his death, which happened a little before the war of Perusia, when he left her pregnant with a third. By the Roman laws, widows were forbid to marry within ten months after their husbands decease. This statute, however, Octavia was exempted from by a decree of the senate. The public welfare required it. The people of Rome had but too great cause to fear, that Marc Antony and Augustus would quarrel, and so prolong the civil war, if not prevented by some powerful mediator. Antony was then a widower, and nothing promised so fair for compassing such a happy event, as his marriage with Octavia. All imaginable dispatch was therefore used to bring it to a conclusion, which was done even before the lady was brought to bed. It was the general persuasion that Octavia, whose exquisite beauty was heightened by gravity and prudence, would be the means of a most happy and lasting peace. Their nuptials were solemnized, in 714.

Three years after this, peace was concluded with Pompey's son. Augustus continued in Italy, and Antony went with Octavia into Greece. The winter he spent with her at Athens; and being exasperated by some false report against Augustus, set sail for Italy; and being refused admittance into the harbour of Brundusium, he went ashore at Tarentum, and sent Octavia to Augustus. She met her brother by the way, and had a conference with him and his friends Agrippa and Mecænas; when she conjured him, in the most pathetic terms, not to let her, from being the most happy of her sex, become the most wretched. "For now," says she, "the whole world looks upon me as related to two emperors, to the one as a wife, to the other as a sister; but, if pernicious counsels should prevail, and a war break out, it is uncertain which of you