Burroughs, Ella Louise Guerber (1900-1985) (“Louise”). American librarian and curator. Ella Louise Guerber was born in Allentown, PA, and graduated from Cedar Crest College in 1919 and then the library school at Columbia University. At the time she met Cather in 1925, she was a reference librarian at the Denver Public Library and assisted Cather with her research on Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). In 1926, Guerber moved to New York City to take a position at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she saw Cather frequently in person. She married Bryson Burroughs, Curator of Paintings, in 1928; he died in 1934. In 1950, when she received an honorary degree from Cedar Crest, she was Associate Curator of Paintings at the Met. After her retirement, she moved to Baltimore, MD, and then Princeton, NJ, where she died. Her friendship with Cather is documented by more than seventy letters from Cather to Burroughs from 1925 through Cather’s late life and by a diary documenting her in-person interactions with Cather from 1925 through 1927.

Livia Drusilla (59 or 58 BCE-29 CE) (“Julia Augusta”). Empress of Rome. Born into the Claudian clan, Livia was married to her cousin Tiberius Claudius Nero, with whom she had two sons, Tiberius and Nero Claudius Drusus, through whom she became progenitor of the four emperors who succeeded Augustus. Augustus (then Octavian) fell in love with her in 39 BCE, divorcing his wife and facilitating Livia’s divorce from her husband. Although Livia and Augustus had no children, they remained married for the rest of Augustus’s life, with Livia playing the part of the ideal Roman matron: chaste, obedient, and industrious; she is said to have spun and woven wool for his clothing. She was also rumored to have plotted the deaths and ruin of other potential heirs to Augustus’s throne. There are several different versions of his last words to her in the accounts of Livia by such historians as Suetonius, Tacitus, and Cassius Dio.

Tranquillus, Caius Suetonious (c. 59-c. 140) (“Suetonious”). Roman biographer. Suetonious’s De Vitae Caesurum, a collection of biographies of the twelve Caesars (emperors of Rome), beginning with Julius Caesar and ending with Domitian, survived in a nearly complete form. Before visiting Rome in 1908, Willa Cather read Suetonious in Latin.