Dear Serentia,

1. Well, if I was a mutineer, and Germanicus read his poems to me, I'd be quelled for sure!

2. What Livia did was paint the figs on the tree with her toenail polish remover. By this time, Augustus was beginning to smell a rat. Everyone had been poisoned except himself, Livia and Tiberius. By a process of elimination, he realized that one of them three had to be the killer. He was pretty sure it wasn't himself, and he didn't think that Tiberius was poisoning everyone to make Livia the emperor, so that left just one remaining possibility...
Consequently Augustus was a difficult target, since he would only drink from public fountains or eat food he'd picked himself. Augustus picked the poison figs, ate them in a bowl of Cheerios - and Cheerio (Vale!) Augustus!

Livia Drusilla was the world's first cereal killer!

3. Thiu tells me that the University of Sydney motto really is: "The Syme under southern skies" = "We support Syme, even if those splitters from Macquarie badmouth him, nyah!" (forget the prison sandstone buildings already)

4. As for Livia's crack, you're not the first to have suspicions about it. The ancient banks were temples, like the temple of Vesta, where cives got money in-Vesta-mints.

5. The senate begged Tiberius to vote first, so that they'd all know which way they should vote. How can you call a legal system "independent" when you list so many examples of Tiberius changing their verdicts? And the 10-day waiting period was simply so he'd have time to change any decisions he didn't agree with. I think that Tiberius would be far more likely to promote politically motivated and unjust executions than the "independent" Roman justice system would.

6. The embalmed Lenin is Russia's biggest tourist attraction (2nd only to MacDonalds), and once a month he has a complete overhaul, new skin on the face, haircut, nail trimming, breath-freshener, but...I'm told by the Russian guard that the WORST job is changing the sock!

Strabo
for
LIVIA
(League of Inculpative Villainesses for Imaginative Assassinations)