Augustus

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.”