Empress Livia Drusilla was Roman empress from 27 BC to 14 AD as the wife of Emperor Augustus. She was known as Julia Augusta after her formal adoption into the Julian family in AD 14. "Livia: a blight upon the nation as a mother, a blight upon the house of Caesar as a stepmother". That was Tacitus's assessment of Livia Drusilla.
| The historian elaborated that Livia put her husband, Emperor Augustus, under her control, and banished or had killed every potential heir to the throne in order to promote her own son, the bizzare Tiberius, as his successor. Augustus had no sons, only a daughter, Julia, the child of his first wife. His nephew Marcellus and his beloved grandsons Gaius and Lucius pre-deceased him, all under mysterious circumstances.  |  |
| In 42 AD Livia was deified by Claudius. | After Augustus died in 14 AD, Tiberius became emperor. Livia continued to exert outsized political influence as the mother of the emperor.
She was the great-grandmother of the emperor Caligula, grandmother of the emperor Claudius, and the great-great-grandmother of the emperor Nero. Livia is depicted as having great influence, to the extent where she "had the aged Augustus firmly under control." She died in 29 AD. |  |
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