Augustus

XXIII

THE UNHAPPY RETURN

2 B.C.–A.D. 9

He received a letter from his stepson asking leave to return to Italy, now that he was a private citizen, and visit his family whom he greatly missed. Tiberius claimed that the real reason for his departure had been to avoid the suspicion of rivalry with Gaius and Lucius; now that they were grown up and generally acknowledged as Augustus’ political heirs, his reason for staying away from Rome was no longer valid.

The plea was rejected, with a brutality that reveals pain. The princeps had not forgiven Tiberius for turning his back on him, and what he saw as his stepson’s duty. He wrote: “You should abandon all hope of visiting your family, whom you were so eager to desert.”

Augustus now faced a tricky problem in the east, where in 2 B.C. the already complicated situation in Armenia (which Tiberius had been expected to deal with before his resignation) had been complicated by the death, perhaps murder, of the Parthian monarch Frahâta. His son and successor, Frahâtak, took the opportunity to meddle in the buffer kingdom’s affairs. Unless some action was taken, Augustus saw a danger that Armenia would move out of the Roman and into the Parthian sphere of influence.

The princeps decided to dispatch a military expedition to Armenia, but, of course, the obvious candidate to lead it was no longer available. He hesitated for a time, uncertain what to do, but there was no alternative to overpromoting Gaius, now aged nineteen, and giving him the imperium Tiberius had forfeited.

Of course, Augustus had no intention whatever of launching a war under the generalship of an inexperienced boy, however dear to him, against a wily opponent. What he was looking for was a diplomatic solution. He attached Marcus Lollius to Gaius as comes et rector, “companion and guide”—two potentially incompatible roles. Lollius had suffered a minor military defeat in Gaul at the hands of German marauders, but retained the confidence of the princeps. His main weakness was greed; he had made himself a very rich man by despoiling any province to which he was assigned. That aside, he was a safe pair of hands.

Gaius made his base on the island of Samos. Tiberius, anxious to demonstrate his loyalty, visited to pay him a courtesy call; this stiff and proud man humbled himself by throwing himself at his stepson’s feet. Gaius gave him a chilly welcome, apparently on Lollius’ advice (presumably briefed by the princeps).

Augustus’ unease about his disgraced stepson was reinforced when he learned that some centurions of Tiberius’ appointment had been circulating mysterious messages to various people, which appeared to be incitements to revolution. He fired off a letter of complaint to Rhodes. Thoroughly alarmed, Tiberius answered with repeated demands that someone, of whatever rank, be appointed to stay with him on Rhodes and watch everything he said or did. To avoid any distinguished visitors, he spent all his time at his country place and took to wearing Greek clothes (a cloak and slippers) rather than a Roman toga.

Meanwhile, Gaius spent time traveling in leisurely fashion through the region and showing the flag. He seems to have acted partly as a general and partly as a tourist. According to Pliny, his imagination was “fired by the fame of Arabia”; in A.D. 1, the young commander, serving his consulship in absentia, marched south to look around and conducted some sort of campaign against the Nabataean Arabs.

The display of force had its intended effect on the Parthians, although Frahâtak began by blustering. He sent a delegation to Rome to give his version of events in Armenia and, as a condition of peace being restored in the kingdom, demanded the return of his brothers who were being brought up at Rome. The princeps replied with a sharp note addressed merely to Frahâtak, without using the title of king. The Parthian wrote back, tit for tat, referring to himself as King of Kings and to Augustus by his ordinary cognomen of Caesar.

The impasse was broken by the death of Rome’s nominee for the Armenian throne. Presumably with Parthian approval, his rival, Dikran (one of the numerous members of the royal family called by this name, and not the same person as the aforementioned Dikran II), wrote to Augustus, not applying to himself the title of king and asking for the right to the kingdom. The princeps accepted Dikran’s gifts, confirmed him as monarch, and advised him to visit his son in Syria, where he was cordially received.

In A.D. 2, Gaius and Frahâtak, also a young man, accompanied by equal retinues, held a carefully orchestrated conference on an island in the Euphrates (did Augustus advise on this arrangement, recalling the long-ago discussions among the triumvirs on the river island at Bononia?). They exchanged pledges and banquets. The Parthian recognized Armenia as within the Roman sphere of influence and dropped his request for the return of his brothers.

For his part, Augustus renewed amicitia between the two empires, silently agreeing to leave Parthia alone and accepting the Euphrates as marking the furthest extent of Rome’s legitimate concerns. He had reason to be pleased; with the Parthian princes still under his control at Rome, he had won the game on points, with not a drop of blood spilled. All was well, and it would not be too long before the victorious commander returned home.

“Dis aliter visum,” as Virgil wrote in the Aeneid. The gods had different ideas.

A fond, anxious, and proud princeps kept a distant but sharp eye on his adopted son’s progress. On September 23, A.D. 1, his sixty-third birthday, he wrote a letter to Gaius that gives a flavor of his love for the young man:

Greetings, my Gaius. My darling little donkey, whom Heaven knows I miss when you are away…I beg the gods that I may spend however much time is left to me, with you safe and well, the country in a flourishing condition—and you and Lucius playing your part like true men and taking over guard duty from me.

Augustus will have been worried by a surprising development. At their island meeting, Frahâtak revealed to Gaius that Lollius had been taking bribes from kings throughout the east and, according to Velleius Paterculus, who was a military tribune on the expedition, had “traitorous designs.” Gaius dismissed Lollius from his amicitia, his list of official friends, and the disgraced man drank poison to avoid the confiscation of his estate.

One day at a dinner party attended by Gaius, Tiberius’ name came up in the conversation. A toadying guest promised that, if his general were only to say the word, he would sail straight to Rhodes and “fetch back the exile’s head.” Gaius declined the offer, but someone reported the incident to Tiberius, who, realizing that his position had become perilous, wrote again to Rome pleading to be allowed to come back. Livia backed him up with passion, and at last the princeps yielded, on the strict condition that Tiberius should take no part, and renounce all interest, in politics.

However, Augustus insisted that the final decision be left to Gaius. Had Lollius still been in place, he would have opposed the concession, but his replacement as adviser was well disposed toward Tiberius, who was allowed at last to leave an island that had once been a refuge but had become a prison. He slunk back into the city, sold his grand town house, and bought a discreet residence in a less fashionable district, where he lived in strict retirement.

The good news from the east was more than balanced by terrible news from the west. The nineteen-year-old Lucius had been sent to Spain, probably to gain military experience. On August 20, A.D. 2, he succumbed to a sudden illness at Massilia en route to taking up his commission. To show family solidarity, Tiberius wrote an elegy to his stepson. We do not know the cause of death, nor the impact it had on the divine family. It will have been only too bitterly clear, though, that Augustus’ dynastic plans now hung by the thread of a single life.

The Parthian settlement was disturbed by the unexpected death of the Armenian king Dikran. Rome nominated a successor, but he, too, died, and his son ascended the throne. Once again, Armenian insurgents broke out into revolt, and Gaius saw some real fighting. While laying siege to a small town, he rashly approached the walls for a parley with the governor, who said he wished to change sides. He handed Gaius a document, then, while the Roman was looking at it, suddenly struck him with his drawn sword. The ploy was for naught: the governor was quickly overcome and killed, and the town captured.

The wounded man seemed to recover, but the injury took time to heal. According to Dio, Gaius did not enjoy strong health in the first place, and now he fell into a depression. A most surprising turn of events followed. In A.D. 4, Gaius wrote to Augustus announcing that he wanted to retire into private life; his intention was to settle somewhere in Syria. No explanation has come down to us, but it seems that he had lost confidence in himself, and in his ability or desire to fulfill the destiny his adoptive father had laid down for him.

Gaius’ letter struck like lightning from a blue sky, and Augustus was dismayed. He informed the Senate of the young man’s wishes, and wrote back begging his adopted son to return to Italy, and then do as he chose. Gaius’ response was to resign all his duties with immediate effect and set off for home. He made his way south to the Mediterranean coast, where he caught a cargo ship. He disembarked at Limyra, a town in Lycia (today’s southern Turkey), where he died on February 21. Presumably his wound had never healed. He was twenty-three years old.

For the princeps, nothing worse could now happen. He expended his fury on Gaius’ tutor and attendants. During their employer’s illness and final days, they were said to have behaved with arrogance and greed; worse, according to Velleius Paterculus, they encouraged “defects” in Gaius’ personality “as a result of which he wished to spend his life in a remote and distant corner of the world rather than return to Rome.” Augustus had them thrown into a river with weights tied around their necks.

The news of Gaius’ death will have reached Rome not later than the end of March. Augustus was sixty-six years old and, according to Dio, exhausted “through old age and sickness.” The ancient sources say nothing directly about his personal reaction to the deaths of Gaius and Lucius. The boys had spent much of their short lives in his company, for (as we have seen) he had acted as both father and schoolmaster. In his will, he referred to the “atrox fortuna,” malign fate, that had snatched them away. We can only imagine his grief at their loss.

Yet the princeps somehow found the energy to reconstruct the divine family. He had no choice but to beg Tiberius to rejoin him as his collega imperii. He paused for a time over the name of Germanicus, Drusus’ delightful son, inheritor of his father’s popularity; but Germanicus was only about seventeen years old and had had no experience to speak of in the art of government. Livia lent her voice to her son’s cause in what Tacitus calls her “secret diplomacy.” In fact, a whispering campaign accused her of having taken more tangible steps to advance Tiberius’ return to the limelight.

Her stepmotherly treachery had supposedly delivered the deaths of Lucius and then Gaius. It is certainly true that their disappearance undid the massive blunder of Tiberius’ withdrawal to Rhodes, and his mother can hardly be blamed for speaking up for her son. It is implausible in the extreme that she could have suborned the governor of an Armenian town, but it is conceivable that the boys’ doctors were in her pay; poisoned medicine could have hastened them to Hades. However, the odds on failure were surely far too high, and the consequences of discovery too dire, for an astute political operator to countenance accepting the risk.

It is a sign of the strength of Tiberius’ position that at first he resisted the recall to office, if we can believe Velleius, and declined the offer of tribunician status, arguing against it both privately and in the Senate. This reservation was unlikely, of course, to have been sincere, for it was clear where both his duty and his interest lay, but it reflected a desire to extract the best possible deal. Tiberius felt he had been shabbily treated by Augustus. The princeps had a way of following his own agenda and taking no account of other people’s wishes or feelings. If Tiberius was to return to power, it would have to be on his own terms. He insisted that Augustus wholeheartedly accept him as his successor, and do nothing whatever to subvert his position.

It took Augustus until June 26, nearly three months, before he was ready to announce his new dynastic arrangements. The situation facing him was rather like a change in the balance of a multiparty government. The grouping of senior political personalities who had supported Gaius and Lucius, the “Julian faction,” was in retreat, and the bruised clique around Livia and Tiberius, the “Claudian faction,” was in the ascendant. The final agreement, which must have been awkward to negotiate, established a coalition in which both factions were catered to. Tiberius received tribunician status for ten years and imperium to lead a military campaign in Germany. Augustus adopted him as his son, saying that he was acting reipublicae causa, “for reasons of state” (a remark that suggests the acceptance of bitter necessity rather than enthusiasm).

To satisfy the Julian faction, the princeps also adopted Agrippa Postumus, Agrippa’s last living son. This was less politically significant than it might seem, for Postumus was an exceptionally difficult teenager. He was well-built and had an “animal-like confidence in his physical strength.” Although he had committed no crime and been involved in no scandal, his personality was ill adapted to the pressures and constraints of public life. That he was not granted adult status until the following year, A.D. 5, at the late age of seventeen, and that he failed to win the privileges Gaius and Lucius had enjoyed, suggests that something was wrong. However, Augustus may have hoped that Agrippa would grow more responsible with the passage of time. In any case, he wanted to have another iron, however unsatisfactory, in the fire.

Also as part of the agreement, Tiberius was obliged to adopt his nephew Germanicus. Now nineteen years old, Germanicus was Augustus’ great-nephew and so a member of the bloodline. In the following year the princeps married Germanicus to his granddaughter Agrippina (daughter of Julia and Agrippa); their offspring would double the genetic link back to him. If for once the gods were kind, imperial authority would eventually revert, after a Claudian diversion, to the Julian clan.

However, nothing could conceal the fact that the new concordat distinctly favored the Claudians. Tiberius was the winner. As might have been expected, his supporters were promoted and his enemies purged: this was probably one of the purposes behind yet another review of Senate membership that Augustus conducted later in the year. Having redetermined the succession and reorganized his government, the princeps sent Tiberius to campaign on the German frontier. Imperial expansion was close to his heart, as it had always been, but also it would conveniently remove his collega imperii from domestic politics and eliminate the need for the uneasy pair to work together on a daily basis.

But it could not eliminate the need entirely. The new son did not altogether trust the new father, and visited Rome as often as his military duties permitted—in Dio’s words, “because he was afraid that Augustus might take advantage of his absence to show preference to somebody else.” In his absence, the Julian faction might regain lost ground.

The family disputes were not yet over, although the ancient sources are scanty and cryptic. We hear distant detonations but do not witness the battle. The focus of a crisis that unrolled over three years or so were the remaining children of Marcus Agrippa and Julia—Postumus and his sister, the younger Julia, who must have been in her late teens or early twenties.

Postumus continued to do badly. Augustus was worried about letting him out of his sight, although he had no qualms about sending Germanicus to serve in the army. This was a pity, because military experience might have calmed Postumus down. No courtier, the young man spent much of his time fishing, and called himself Neptune after the god of the sea. He had bouts of rage and spoke angrily about Livia. He blamed his new paterfamilias for withholding his paternal inheritance from him. He also probably felt that he lacked advancement.

Matters grew so difficult that Augustus formally severed Postumus’ ties with the Julian family and packed him off to Surrentum (today’s Sorrento), probably in A.D. 6. The popular resort was not far from Cape Misenum, the naval base for one of Rome’s fleets that his father had founded, and if Postumus was misbehaving politically as well as personally he could have been tampering with the loyalty of the sailors (the nickname of Neptune is suggestive). In any event, Suetonius records that “because [his] conduct, so far from improving, grew daily more irresponsible, he was transferred to an island, and held under military surveillance.”

This took place in A.D. 7, and the island was low-lying Planasia, south of Elba (today’s Pianosa; until recently, it housed an Italian army prison). It had been owned in the first century B.C. by a leading Roman family, and on it stood a villa, some baths, and a tiny open-air theater; it may have been another of Augustus’ luxury bolt-holes like Pandateria, and exile there will not have been too incommodious.

In the following year, a mysterious scandal engulfed the younger Julia. She was banished to the tiny limestone island of Trimerus, off the Apulian coast (today’s San Nicola in the Tremiti Islands). With a surface area of less than thirty-five acres, this was an isolated and confined spot, far from Rome. No grand villa has been discovered. Julia’s living costs were paid by Livia.

The princeps’ granddaughter’s offense, like that of the elder Julia, was sexual promiscuity. The charge is likely to have had a basis in fact, for she gave birth to a child on the island, whom Augustus refused to acknowledge or have reared. Her lover was Decius Junius Silanus; Augustus revoked his amicitia and the young nobleman left Rome.

These misdemeanors may have concealed a more serious matter. The younger Julia’s husband was Lucius Aemilius Paullus. It appears that he was accused of plotting against the life of the princeps and was executed. If his wife was accused of adultery, he must have been alive at the time of her banishment (one late commentator says she was once recalled, only to be exiled again) and his conspiracy probably took place in A.D. 8; so the banishment and the conspiracy may have been linked.

Whatever the politics of his troubles, Augustus’ emotions were fully engaged. In future years, when anyone mentioned Agrippa or the two Julias in conversation, he would sigh deeply and sometimes quote a line from the Iliad:

Ah, never to have married, and childless to have died!

He referred to Agrippa and the Julias as “my three boils” and “my three running sores.”

In A.D. 9, Augustus exiled Ovid to the semibarbarous outpost of Tomis (modern Constanta) on the Black Sea. His offense was made a state secret, although the poet dropped numerous hints in two sequences of poems, Tristia (“Sad Things”) and Epistulae ex Ponto (“Letters from Pontus”), with which he bombarded his friends in Rome, begging for forgiveness and describing the miseries of life in distant Thrace.

The mystery has exercised and amused scholars for centuries. In summary, Ovid committed an error—a mistake—not a crime; he took no action himself, but witnessed others doing something that he should have reported to Augustus but did not. He caused the princeps deep pain. Ovid compares himself to the guiltless huntsman who inadvertently stumbled on the goddess Diana bathing in a spring; she turned him into a stag and set his dogs on him.

Why did I see what I saw? Why render my eyes guilty?

Why unwittingly take cognizance of a crime?

Actaeon never intended to see Diana naked,

but still was torn to bits by his own hounds.

His poem Ars Amatoria, especially the didactic pose he struck as a “tutor in love-making,” was not the cause of his dismissal, but it did not help his case.

It is hard to make sense of this sequence of enigmatic events, but two factors may throw light on them. First, the years A.D. 6 and 7 were extremely testing for the regime. Military campaigns were under way abroad, but as yet victories had not been won. In Rome there was a severe famine, and emergency security measures had to be taken. Gladiators were banned, and to prevent the dumping of hungry mouths any slaves who were up for sale were banished to a hundred miles from the city.

Augustus and senior officials dismissed most of their staff, and senators were encouraged to leave Rome. Grain and bread were rationed, except for the poorest section of the population, whose grain dole was doubled. There was trouble, too, abroad. Pirates harassed shipping in some parts of the Mediterranean, and rebellions occurred in a number of provinces. King Juba of Mauretania required help from a Roman army to put down a serious revolt in northern Africa. Worse followed, for a great fire destroyed much of the city.

In Rome, the masses became restive and people talked openly of revolution. Dissident posters were distributed at night. An investigation was launched, only adding to the general commotion and apparently not coming to any conclusion. Do we have here telltale signs of the Julian faction at work, currying favor with the people as the elder Julia may have done when she garlanded the statue of Marsyas in the Forum?

As for the sad fate of Ovid, learned men have imagined that the poet accidentally saw Livia having a bath, or caught the princeps in an act of pedophilia, or came upon Julia and Postumus engaging in incestuous sex. The poet’s own statements point to a political blunder. If he overheard or witnessed some act or conversation preparatory to a coup, the need for official secrecy is perfectly understandable. His reputation for celebrating sexual indecency provided a convincing cover story that distracted from Julia’s real offense.

Ovid may have hinted at what this was. When he wrote what he did not do, he may have been pointing to what others did.

I never sought to procure universal ruin by threatening

Caesar’s head, the head of the world;

I said nothing, my tongue never shaped words of violence,

no seditious impieties escaped me in my cups.

Careless talk at a drunken party is what seems to have done for Julia and implicated her poetical fellow guest in her ruin. Ovid with foolish tact “forgot” what he had heard or pretended not to have heard it. But presumably someone else present quietly informed the princeps of the conversation and who else had been within earshot.

It was not Augustus’ fault that fate kept unpicking his arrangements for the succession, but his ruthless rearrangement of the lives of his close relatives led to one after another refusing to serve and perhaps even conspiring against him—Agrippa perhaps, Tiberius, Gaius, the two Julias, Agrippa Postumus. The consequence was the almost complete destruction of the divine family as an effective, mutually loyal group. The only survivors were the patient wife and her suspicious son.

Over the years, the princeps had allowed his household to be corrupted into a court where a family’s ordinary loves and tiffs gradually mutated into political struggle. Maybe this was an inevitable development, but it was Augustus who set the inhumane tone. His insensitivity to the feelings of others (one thinks of Tiberius’ thwarted love for Vipsania), his treatment of his relatives as pawns, created a deadly environment. It would not be surprising if, in time, blood relations came to bloody conclusions.