The Augustan Empire 43 BC

Phraates IV of Parthia had just, after a long reign, been murdered, and succeeded, by his favourite son, who, with anti-Roman zeal, had assisted in the ejection of the king of Armenia, all that while a Roman nominee. There was an irritable international correspondence, and an air in Rome as of the prelude to a Parthian war; but Augustus repeated almost exactly the successful formula of twenty years before.[210] Tiberius Nero had been his envoy then, and could have been so again, but he was in retirement: indeed, since all his formal powers had run out, and no attempt had been made to renew them, he was — like his wife — an exile. In any case, the occasion could be used to give Gaius Caesar his first impressive role in the official drama; so in 1 B.C., invested with an imperium for the whole East, he set out, amidst a cloud of diplomatic advisers and to the strains of eager poetasters.[211] There was no state of war, so no hurry; in a.d. i,[212]when he entered in absentia upon his long-prearranged consulship, Gaius was engaged in some sort of campaign in Nabatean Arabia.¹⁷⁰ The hopes he carried with him (along with his brother, who died, however, in a.d. 2 at Massilia of some non-sinister cause) are revealed in a letter of Augustus to him written in September, a.d. 2:'... with you two playing your part like true men and taking over the sentry-post from me'.[213] The great diplomatic exchange of courtesies duly took place, on an island in the Euphrates,[214] followed, as it were canonically, by the march to set a Roman protege again on the Armenian throne. This time it was not a formality. At an unknown place, Artagera, Gaius received a stab- wound, though it seemed to heal, and both he and Augustus took imperatorial salutations.¹⁷³ And then occurred the strangest event in the whole tale. Tiberius Nero had just been permitted to return to Rome, a mere private citizen, with a question-mark upon his future;[215] and now Gaius wrote home to say that he was going to retire into private life and contemplation.[216] He was 23. People said at the time, and they were very likely right, that Gaius was a mortally sick man, and, to Augustus' culminating dismay, in a.d. 4 he died; in so short an interval were both the young hopefuls gone. But one can imagine, even before that, the effect of the letter of resignation: 'You too, son'. Like Tiberius and like Iulia: this was the canker that had rotted Augustus' third decade, that the people of his choice did not want to tread his path of duty. When, in a.d. 3, his constitutional powers were again renewed (and for a full decade) there could be no word of Tiberius Nero or of Gaius Caesar, for both were sulking in their tents; there was no collega imperii.

But in a.d. 4 Augustus, alone, implacable¹⁷⁶ and indefatigable, with imperialism and social reform still on his agenda, bowed to political necessity. Tiberius Nero was rehabilitated faute de mieux, received tribunician power for ten years,[217] and was appointed to command in Germany,¹⁷⁸ though apparently even then not with a general imperium maius. The dynastic goal was still the old one. Augustus' nearest relatives, apart from his daughter, were now her surviving three children, her daughters Iulia and Agrippina and her son Agrippa, the so- called 'Postumus'; and the goal determined the action. On 26 June a.d. 4 Augustus adopted Tiberius and Agrippa as his sons — 'for the sake of the res publico', he is supposed to have said in Tiberius' case[218] (though we cannot recapture the tone of that remark, whether of bleak resignation or of confident affirmation). For Tiberius, the choice was power and the chance of new military glory, even if only, still, as a caretaker, over against eclipse and perhaps worse. As for Agrippa, he must not be treated as just peripheral to the story.[219] The ancient writers all describe him as truculent and retarded;¹⁸¹ he may have become so, or this may be no more than the official story by which his later exile and elimination were justified. Bur in a.d. 4 he was a still viable, if eleventh-hour, replacement for his deceased brothers. In any case, that was not the full extent of the ruler's scheme. For, at the same time, Tiberius adopted his own nephew, Nero Claudius Germanicus, son of the adored Drusus, to count as brother to his own son, the second Drusus. Germanicus was married to Agrippina, so it was their children who would carry the Julian inheritance — an exceedingly efficient way of repairing the badly torn 'divine family'.