Livia now conceived fresh hopes for her sons. By her intrigues she succeeded in procuring the divorce of Tiberius, her first-born, who was at that time thirty years of age, from his wife, and his marriage with the emperor’s widowed daughter, who had borne three sons to Agrippa—Caius, Lucius, and Agrippa, and two daughters, Julia and Agrippina. Augustus with difficulty suppressed his dislike of his ambitious, overbearing, and sullen stepson.
Within a very few years the circle of friends which Augustus had gathered about him had been sadly thinned by death. Agrippa, Octavia, Drusus, and Mæcenas had sunk into the tomb within the space of four years (from 12 to 8 B.C.). Thus with declining age the emperor fixed his affections all the more exclusively upon his two grandsons, Caius and Lucius, the children of his daughter Julia and his friend Agrippa. He admitted them by adoption into the Julian family, conferred the title of Cæsar upon them, and had them brought up under his own eye; he even devoted part of his own leisure to their instruction and education. They were his usual companions at table, and were treated with such distinction that all men regarded them as the future heirs of the empire. The populace and the senate vied with each other in offering homage and adulation to the imperial grandsons of Augustus, and they were loaded with fresh honours and dignities every year.
But this brilliant position was fated to be the ruin of the young princes. It not only filled their own hearts with presumption and self-conceit; Livia and Tiberius turned eyes of envy and hatred upon the favoured pair. When Augustus, who was not blind to their sentiments, attempted to remove his stepson from the capital by giving him the honourable task of conducting a campaign in Armenia, the latter declined the proffered honour out of mortified pride, and begged leave to spend some years in learned leisure in the island of Rhodes. The leave was granted, and extended even beyond his desires. For seven years he stayed in the Greek island; busy with philosophical and mathematical studies, and observing the constellations in the night hours under the guidance of Thrasyllus, to draw auguries for the future from their position. His absence was at first associated with demonstrations of honour, through the splendour of the tribunician office which Augustus had conferred on him before his departure; but in course of time it assumed more and more the character of an exile, and Julia took advantage of it to increase her father’s aversion for the husband she abhorred.
Frivolous, vain, and wanton, the emperor’s daughter had caused him many a heartache by the levity of her conduct and her fondness for amusement; but she had always been able to propitiate his wrath and regain her ascendency by her amiability, her talent for witty and delightful conversation, her culture, and her art of delicate flattery. He shut his eyes when she violated the outward propriety and decorum which he endeavoured to diffuse over the private life of the imperial family, or when she showed herself in public surrounded by a swarm of aristocratic young men of lax morals. If he were annoyed at some too wanton attire of hers, she would presently appear in the decorous garb of a Roman matron and enliven her father by some jesting observation. The circle of blooming grandchildren with which she had surrounded his throne, and by which she seemed to have ensured his line in the possession of the monarchy, inclined him to judge her leniently and to make allowances for her.
But Livia’s intriguing temper found ways and means to destroy this bond and to extinguish in the father’s heart the long-cherished belief in his daughter’s innocence. She contrived to arouse in him the dark suspicion that Julia was not only disgracing the honour of the imperial house by a licentious way of life, but that she and her lovers had actually conceived hostile designs against his person and the security of the empire. For by this alone can we explain the harsh measures adopted by Augustus, who had his daughter suddenly banished without trial to the little island of Pandataria off the Campanian coast, and informed the senate that through shameless wantonness she had so far erred as to make the Forum and tribune the scene of nocturnal orgies and the witness of her gallantries. Her accomplices, real or supposed, who were for the most part opponents of Tiberius, shared the same fate of exile, or suffered the penalty of death, like the gifted and cultured son of the triumvir, Julus Antonius, eminent both as a statesman and a soldier. The sympathy and compassion of the people accompanied the emperor’s daughter (then thirty-eight years of age) into her place of punishment. Her guilt and transgression were her portion in the life of a degenerate age and city steeped in pleasures and vices, her penance was the outcome of the envy and malignity of an intriguing stepmother.
Her life in exile, which was voluntarily shared by her mother Scribonia, was rich in deeds of benevolence and charity. She died at Rhegium soon after her father, full of sorrows and weary of life. The gifted and eloquent Sempronius Gracchus, who had enjoyed her favour and love in happier days and had consequently been banished to the African island of Cercina, died about the same time by the hands of assassins sent by Tiberius to despatch him; showing himself by his fortitude in death not unworthy of the Sempronian name which in his life he had brought to shame.
[1 B.C.-9 A.D.]
With the banishment of Julia commenced that series of misfortunes which ended by leaving the house of Augustus desolate and inflicted deep wounds upon his paternal heart. In that same year her eldest son, the eighteen-year-old Caius Cæsar, undertook a campaign in Asia at the head of a considerable army, in order to reduce to submission the Armenians—who had revolted from the dominion of Rome by the help of the Parthians—and to chastise the refractory Arab tribes. Armed with authority of the proconsular imperium over all the provinces of the east, so that absolute power in matters military and civil rested in his hands and all local governors were subject to his commands, the youthful commander-in-chief crossed to Egypt by way of Samos, accompanied by M. Lollius and other experienced and learned men whom Augustus had placed about him as counsellors. Tiberius, who visited his stepson during his stay on the island, was able to draw from the coolness of his reception the conclusion that his own star was on the decline and that Caius Cæsar was universally recognised and honoured as the heir to the empire. From Egypt the expedition passed through Palestine to Syria. All men bowed before the imperial youth who seemed destined to inherit the empire of the world, and vied with one another in proffering homage, courting favour, and bringing gifts. Access to the youthful imperator was purchased of Lollius at a high price.
The enemies of Rome were struck with awe at this display of might and majesty. The Nabatæans of Petra voluntarily returned to their previous position of dependence, and in a personal interview with the Roman commander-in-chief on an island in the Euphrates, Phraates, king of Parthia, concluded a peace on terms dictated by this mighty ruler and evacuated Armenia, which was then quickly conquered by the legions after a faint resistance, and was again numbered among Roman dependencies.
Caius Cæsar then made ready to return home. Feeble of body and greatly distressed by a wound received at the siege of the town of Artagera on the Euphrates, he had no desire for more of the hardships and perils of war; he longed for enjoyment and tranquillity rather than for honour and military reputation. Both were denied him. Death overtook him at Lycia on his homeward way. Before he died he received the mournful tidings that his younger brother Lucius Cæsar had suddenly fallen a victim to sickness eighteen months earlier, at Massilia, on an expedition into Spain.