According to Suetonius the one woman who was the love of Octavian/Augustus's life was Livia, his second wife. The fact that Livia has been vilified in both legitimate historiography (principally by Tacitus) and in popular historical fiction (mainly Robert Graves's I, Claudius) would suggest Augustus was a poor judge of character, at least when it came to women. But present-day historians have tended to be skeptical, to put it mildly, of this negative picture of Livia. Though we have few primary sources to rely on for the period, contemporary speculation may suggest Livia had been a victim of the gender stereotypes in early Roman Empire and those who documented it.

Conspiracy theories were at least as prevalent in the first century C.E. as at any period of history, including our own. Usually when a series of catastrophes have occurred people look for a simple explanation, fixing blame on one "player" or on a small group alleged to have overreaching and disproportionate power and influence. Tacitus and others, cherishing the ideal of the old Republic, saw the Julio-Claudian era as a disaster for Rome, beginning especially with what was seen as the corruption of Tiberius, both politically and personally. Tacitus's view was that Livia's sole ambition, to which she subordinated everything else, was to insure that her son Tiberius, Augustus's stepson, became emperor. The suggestion was that Livia even may have gone so far as to poison her husband Augustus to death.

Given that at the distance of 2,000 years there is no way of "proving" or "disproving" that allegation, it was easy enough for the popular consciousness (whatever that may amount to concerning as archaic a subject as ancient Rome) to find the Livia rumors believable, particularly when promoted by the literary efforts of as skilled a writer as Robert Graves and the much lauded PBS series from the 1970's based on his I, Claudius. Yet, as stated, the anti-Livia cult is a combination of typical conspiracy theorizing and misogyny. Probably it would be more accurate to regard Augustus and Livia as the ultimate "power couple" of their time, during which it's not an exaggeration to say that the foundations of modern Europe were established, despite the 1,500 further years it would take for the map of the countries we know today to coalesce into a recognizable shape in the Renaissance.