In the end, despite all his efforts, Augustus was back where he could have started all along, with Livia’s son Tiberius, who became the next emperor in 14 CE. Pliny the Elder could not resist pointing out one other irony of this. Tiberius Claudius Nero, the new emperor’s father, had been on Antony’s side in the civil war, and his family had been among those besieged at Perusia. Augustus died, Pliny quipped, ‘with the son of his enemy as his heir’.
