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.”
This took place in A.D. 7, and the island was low-lying Planasia, south of Elba (today’s Pianosa; until recently, it housed an Italian army prison). It had been owned in the first century B.C. by a leading Roman family, and on it stood a villa, some baths, and a tiny open-air theater; it may have been another of Augustus’ luxury bolt-holes like Pandateria, and exile there will not have been too incommodious.
In the following year, a mysterious scandal engulfed the younger Julia. She was banished to the tiny limestone island of Trimerus, off the Apulian coast (today’s San Nicola in the Tremiti Islands). With a surface area of less than thirty-five acres, this was an isolated and confined spot, far from Rome. No grand villa has been discovered. Julia’s living costs were paid by Livia.
The princeps’ granddaughter’s offense, like that of the elder Julia, was sexual promiscuity. The charge is likely to have had a basis in fact, for she gave birth to a child on the island, whom Augustus refused to acknowledge or have reared. Her lover was Decius Junius Silanus; Augustus revoked his amicitia and the young nobleman left Rome.
These misdemeanors may have concealed a more serious matter. The younger Julia’s husband was Lucius Aemilius Paullus. It appears that he was accused of plotting against the life of the princeps and was executed. If his wife was accused of adultery, he must have been alive at the time of her banishment (one late commentator says she was once recalled, only to be exiled again) and his conspiracy probably took place in A.D. 8; so the banishment and the conspiracy may have been linked.
Whatever the politics of his troubles, Augustus’ emotions were fully engaged. In future years, when anyone mentioned Agrippa or the two Julias in conversation, he would sigh deeply and sometimes quote a line from the Iliad:
Ah, never to have married, and childless to have died!
He referred to Agrippa and the Julias as “my three boils” and “my three running sores.”
In A.D. 9, Augustus exiled Ovid to the semibarbarous outpost of Tomis (modern Constanta) on the Black Sea. His offense was made a state secret, although the poet dropped numerous hints in two sequences of poems, Tristia (“Sad Things”) and Epistulae ex Ponto (“Letters from Pontus”), with which he bombarded his friends in Rome, begging for forgiveness and describing the miseries of life in distant Thrace.
The mystery has exercised and amused scholars for centuries. In summary, Ovid committed an error—a mistake—not a crime; he took no action himself, but witnessed others doing something that he should have reported to Augustus but did not. He caused the princeps deep pain. Ovid compares himself to the guiltless huntsman who inadvertently stumbled on the goddess Diana bathing in a spring; she turned him into a stag and set his dogs on him.
Why did I see what I saw? Why render my eyes guilty?
Why unwittingly take cognizance of a crime?
Actaeon never intended to see Diana naked,
but still was torn to bits by his own hounds.
His poem Ars Amatoria, especially the didactic pose he struck as a “tutor in love-making,” was not the cause of his dismissal, but it did not help his case.
It is hard to make sense of this sequence of enigmatic events, but two factors may throw light on them. First, the years A.D. 6 and 7 were extremely testing for the regime. Military campaigns were under way abroad, but as yet victories had not been won. In Rome there was a severe famine, and emergency security measures had to be taken. Gladiators were banned, and to prevent the dumping of hungry mouths any slaves who were up for sale were banished to a hundred miles from the city.