Augustus

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.