[B.C. 6 (a. u. 748)]
[-9-] The year following, which marked the consulship of Gaius Antistius and Lælius Balbus, Augustus was displeased to see that Gaius and Lucius, who were being brought up in the lap of sovereignty, did not carefully imitate his ways. They not only lived too luxuriously, but showed unseemly audacity. Lucius once entered the theatre by himself and became the center of attraction of the whole population; some merely let him engross their thoughts and others openly paid court to him. This treatment made him more arrogant, and among his other doings he proposed for consul Gaius, who was not yet a iuvenis. His father, however, expressed the earnest wish that no such complication of circumstances might arise as once occurred in his own case,—that any one younger than twenty should be consul. When the people still remained urgent he then said that a man ought to receive this office at time when he would not be liable to error himself and could resist the passions of the populace. After that he gave Gaius a priesthood, with the right of attendance in the senate and of beholding spectacles and sitting at banquets with that body. And wishing in some way [6] to rebuke them still more severely he bestowed upon Tiberius the tribunician authority for five years, and assigned to him Armenia, which was becoming estranged since the death of Tigranes. The result was that he was soon at odds with the people and Tiberius, though without effecting anything. The people felt that they had been slighted, and Tiberius feared their anger. He was, however, soon sent to Rhodes on the pretext that he needed some education; and he took not even his entire retinue, to say nothing of others, that so his appearance and his deeds might drop out of their minds. [The trip he made as a private person except in so far as he compelled the Parians to sell him the statue of Vesta, that it might be placed in the temple of Concord. When he reached the island he neither behaved at all nor spoke in an overweening way.—This is the truest reason for his foreign journey.] There is also a story current that he did this on account of his wife Julia, because he could no longer endure her; at any rate she was left behind at Rome. [Others have said that he was angry at not having been designated Cæsar. Others still, that he was driven out by Augustus, being accused of plotting against the latter's children. But that his departure was not for the sake of education nor because he was displeased at the decrees passed became plain from many of his subsequent actions, and especially through his immediately opening his will at that time, and reading it to his mother and to Augustus. But all possible conjectures were made.]
[B.C. 5 (a. u. 749)]
The following year Augustus in the course of his twelfth consulship placed Gaius among the iuvenes and at the same time brought him before the senate, declared him Princeps luventutis, and allowed him to become cavalry commander.
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[B.C. 2 (a. u. 752)]
And after the elapse of a year Lucius also obtained all the honors that had been granted to his brother Gaius. On an occasion when the populace had gathered and were asking that some reforms be instituted, when, indeed, they had sent for this purpose the tribunes to Augustus, Lucius came and deliberated with them about their demands; and at this all were pleased.
[-10-]Augustus limited the number of the populace to be supplied with grain, something previously left vague, to twenty myriads, and, as some say, he gave each one sixty denarii.. .. to Mars, and that he himself and his grandsons, as often as they pleased, and those who were passing from the classification of children and were being registered among the iuvenes, should invariably resort thither; that magistrates being despatched to offices abroad should make that their starting-point; that the senate should there declare their votes in regard to the granting of triumphs and the victors celebrating them should devote to this Mars their sceptre and their crown; that such victors and all others who might obtain triumphal honors should have their likenesses in bronze erected in the Forum; that in case military standards captured by the enemy were ever recovered, they should be placed in the temple; that a festival of the god should be celebrated near the Scalæ by the persons successively occupying the office of præfectus alae; that a nail should be driven for his glory by those acting as censors; that senators have the right to undertake the work of furnishing the horses that were to compete in the equestrian contest, as well as the general care of the temple, precisely as had been provided by law in the case of Apollo and in the case of Jupiter Capitolinus.
These matters settled, Augustus dedicated that spacious hall: yet to Gaius and to Lucius he gave once and for all powers to officiate at all similar consecrations, on the strength of a kind of consular authority (founded on precedent) that they were to use. They, too, directed the horse-race on this occasion, and their brother Agrippa took part with the children of the leading families in the so-called "Troy" equestrian games. Two hundred and sixty lions were slaughtered in the hippodrome. There was a gladiatorial combat in the Sæpta, and a naval battle of "Persians" and "Athenians" was given on the spot, where even at the present day some relics of it are still exhibited. The above were the names applied to the parties engaged, and the Athenians, as of old, came out victorious.
In the course of the spectacle he let water into the Flaminian Hippodrome and thirty-six crocodiles were there cut in pieces. However, Augustus did not serve as consul every day continuously, but after holding office a little while he gave the title of the consulship to another.