believed to have founded Rome, and from whom the Julian gens, including Julius Caesar and Attia, claimed descent, witnessing the conception of Rome's future savior as an Empire, and the greatest of all the Emperors. On the reverse is Octavian, Octavia his sister, widow of Mark Antony (downcast flambeau, broken tablets) and Livia, Octavian's third wife who outlived him. These two are looking directly at each other. Octavian commanded she divorce her then husband and marry him with a few weeks of meeting, she was mother to the future Emperor Tiberius. This vase suggests Octavian was descended partly from Apollo (thus partly divine, shades of Achilles), whom he worshiped as a god, gave private parties in his honor together with Minerva, Roman Goddess of War, from the founder of Rome, and his connection to his uncle Julius Caesar, for whom as a young man he gave a remarkable funeral oratory, and who adopted him on his father's death, when he was only four. All the pieces and people fit in this theory and it explains most mysteries (apart from who actually made it). It would have been a fabulously expensive piece to commission, so that few men of the period could have afforded it. Several attempts at creating the vase must have been made, as modern reproduction trials show today (see below). Historians and archeologists dismiss this modern theory as gods and goddesses with mythical allegories were usually portrayed. Manufacture Cameo glass vessels were probably all made within about two generations, as experiments when the blowing technique (discovered in about 50 BC) was still in its infancy. Recent research suggests that the Portland Vase, like most cameo glass vessels, was made by the dip-overlay method, whereby an elongated bubble of glass was partially dipped into a crucible of white glass before the two were blown together. After cooling the white layer was cut away to form the design. Making a 19th-century copy required painstaking work. This experience suggests that creation of the original Portland Vase required two years of work. Cutting was probably performed by a skilled gem-cutter, possibly Dioskourides. Engraved gems are extant which are of a similar period and are signed and thought to be cut by him (Vollenweider 1966, see Gem in the collection of the Duke of Devonshire "Diomedes stealing the Palladium"). This is confirmed by the Corning Museum in their 190-page study of the vase.