According to the lex de adulteriis, made by Augustus in the year 18, the husband ought either to punish the unfaithful wife himself or denounce her to the praetor.  Could he, Tiberius, provoke so frightful a scandal in the house of the “First Citizen of the Republic”; drive from Rome, defamed, the daughter of Augustus, the most noted lady of Rome, who had so many friends in all circles of its society?  Suetonius speaks of the disgust of Tiberius for Julia, “quam neque criminari aut demittere auderet”—­whom he dared neither incriminate nor repudiate.  On the other hand, did not he, the intransigeant traditionalist, who kept continually reproving the nobility for their laxity in self-discipline, merit rebuke, for allowing this thing to go on, not applying the law?  The difficulty was serious; the lex de adulteriis began to be a torment to its creators.  Unable to separate from, unwilling to live with, this woman who had traduced him and whom he despised, Tiberius was reduced to maintaining a merely apparent union to avoid the scandal of a trial and divorce.

This proceeding, however, was an expedient in that condition of things both insufficient and dangerous.  The discord between Tiberius and Julia put into the hands of the young nobility, up to that time unarmed, a terrible weapon against the illustrious general, who was, meanwhile, fighting the Germans.  The young nobility, inimical to the social laws and to Tiberius, rallied about Julia, and the effects of this alliance were not slow in appearing.  Julia had had five sons by Agrippa, of whom the eldest two, Caius and Lucius, had been adopted by Augustus.  In the year 6 B.C., the eldest, Caius, reached the age of fourteen.  He was therefore but a lad; notwithstanding his youth, there was suddenly brought forward the strange, almost incredible, proposal to make a law by which he might at once be elected consul for the year 754 A.U.C, when he would be twenty years old.

Who made this proposal?  Augustus, if we believe Suetonius, out of excessive fondness for his adopted sons.  Dion, on the contrary, tells these things differently.  He says that from the beginning Augustus opposed the law, and so leads us to doubt that it was either proposed or desired by that Prince.  The facts are that a party in Rome kept insisting till Augustus supported this law with his authority, and that from the first he was unwilling to be accessory to an election that overturned without reason every Roman constitutional right.

Who then were these strange admirers of a child of fourteen, who to make him consul did not hesitate to do violence to tradition, to the laws, to good sense, and, finally, to the adoptive father?  It was the opposition to Tiberius, the party of the young nobility and Julia, who were seeking a rule less severe, and, if not the abolition, at least the mitigated application of the great social laws.  They aimed to put forward the young Caius, to set him early before public attention, to hasten his political career, in order to oppose a rival to Tiberius; to prepare another collaborator and successor of Augustus, to make Tiberius less indispensable and therefore less powerful.