Have you ever thrown a coin into the Trevi Fountain in Rome? You probably stood with your back to the fountain, as advised by everyone around you, but when you turned back, you may well have caught a glimpse of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. He is the armoured gentleman carved on the left-hand panel above the fountain. He is gazing at the plans being shown him by a minion, plans for an aqueduct called the Aqua Virgo that feeds the Trevi still. Agrippa was a man who got things done.
When Agrippa died in 12 AD, his friend, the Emperor Augustus, was devastated. They had met as teenagers, and since then, Agrippa had served Augustus and Rome devotedly. He had built useful things like aqueducts, provided baths for the citizens of Rome, and won the crucial Battle of Actium (amongst many other victories) for his friend. He had even married his friend’s daughter and helped provide the emperor with grandchildren, two boys and two girls. Augustus had adopted the two sons, Gaius and Lucius, and was clearly bringing them up as his heirs. The girls, of course, could be used to make marriage ties with the right people. After Agrippa’s state funeral, the widow was married off again swiftly, maybe even before she could give birth to her husband’s last child in the summer of that year. It is easy to imagine that the boy born several months after his father’s death was a treasured child, born into Rome’s most important family. This may not have been an easy burden, though – the emperor had high hopes and high standards for his family, and Agrippa’s life of faithful hard work was always going to be hard to live up to in the manner expected of Roman sons.
As young Postumus grew, he would have been quickly aware of his place in the scheme of things. He was not the heir or the spare, but he was a potential, and I’m sure he also saw the possibilities. His grandfather and father, between them, had fought civil wars to gain power and bring peace to Rome. Poets sang their praises. The city was slowly being transformed for the better. Agrippa and Augustus had also spent many years planning for the crucial moment when power would be transferred at the death of the emperor.
The emperor had been preparing for his own death and the transfer of power for many years. In the first case, he had looked to his family. He had one daughter, Julia, from a very early and brief marriage to a woman who was divorced almost before she could rise from childbed. Augustus moved on with scandalous swiftness to his next wife, Livia, but in the ensuing fifty years and more of marriage, she and Augustus had no children. She brought two useful sons by her first husband to Augustus’ family, but they were not of Augustus’ blood.
One child, and a daughter at that, was not going to be enough, so Augustus started to look for a way around: if he married off his nephew Marcellus to his daughter Julia and waited for them to produce some children, then he would at least have heirs of his blood. The scheme was thwarted by Marcellus’ early death, prompting Augustus to lower his expectations and marry Julia off to the trusted friend, the loyal, if not family, Marcus Agrippa. Agrippa’s two elder sons, Gaius and Lucius, were adopted, and Augustus oversaw their education closely, even teaching them things like swimming himself. These two boys contained all his hopes, and when Gaius and Lucius were introduced to politics in their teens, Postumus knew that he could be part of the budding dynasty when one of his brothers took over from Augustus.
Unfortunately, by the time young Postumus was a teenager, the carefully prepared line of succession was in tatters, and his home life was much less secure. When he was ten, his mother Julia was sent into exile after a disgraceful sex scandal, when he was fourteen, his brother Lucius died, and then Gaius two years later in 4AD. Augustus moved swiftly, adopting Livia’s son Tiberius, who was by now 46 years old and Postumus, who was only 16. Tiberius was what Augustus clearly needed, an efficient administrator and a respected general, while Postumus as Augustus’ only grandson had at least that all-important blood.
It wasn’t long before Postumus started getting into trouble. Our sources mutter darkly about his character: Suetonius mentions his “ingenium sordidum” (nasty character), Tacitus witheringly says he was “rudem sane bonarum artium et robore corporis stolide ferocem” (his good qualities were unformed, and his physical strength made him fierce). Velleius even says, and such dismissive words have led modern scholars to wonder if, Postumus suffered from mental health issues. Augustus tried sending Postumus out of the public glare in Rome to Surrentum on the Bay of Naples, but this did not work. Cassius Dio tells us that Postumus enjoyed fishing and called himself Neptune, which is hardly a picture of the paragon that Augustus needed to train up to rule. “As he got no better, indeed became more and more out of his mind, he was exiled to an island,” says Suetonius. This probably took place in 7 or 8 AD, although relative timings are hard to work out.
Postumus was not the only person exiled at this time. Exile was Augustus’ way of dealing with members of his family who didn’t suit. Postumus’ mother had been living on the small island of Pandateria since 2 BC, while his sister Julia the younger, disgracefully pregnant by her lover, was similarly exiled to Tremerus off the east coast of Italy in 8 AD. And Augustus did not confine himself to members of his own family. At the same time, the poet Ovid was exiled to Tomis on the coast of the Black Sea, hence the speculation that he was somehow involved with Julia the younger or maybe even Postumus himself. To be a friend to either in 7 or 8 AD would have brought the poet to the attention of the emperor.
Keeping these unsatisfactory relatives away from the public eye was supposed to keep them from becoming the nucleus of any group wishing to make trouble. The last years of Augustus’ reign were filled with distressing incidents that caused unrest. For example, the Varian disaster of 9 AD, where three full legions of the Roman army were lost in the German Teutoburg forest. Should unrest grow to say, insurrection, there were figureheads available, and we do hear stories of plans to “rescue” Postumus or his sister. Nothing came to fruition.
Postumus remained on the island of Planasia until 14 AD, when, according to Tacitus, Augustus visited his grandson. He told nobody but the one friend he took with him, and nobody can say what occurred during that visit. It is tempting to see it as the forerunner of reconciliation – a fading Emperor making amends for his treatment of a misjudged young man – but there are other, less romantic explanations. Maybe Postumus was ill, maybe Augustus, at the ripe old age of 75, felt that he must check one last time on his only grandson’s character. We can’t be sure, and indeed many historians think the whole episode is a fabrication.
Our sources are fairly unanimous in what happened when Augustus died on 19 August of that year: an order was immediately sent to Planasia, and Postumus was executed. Our best sources, Tacitus and Suetonius, admit that they don’t know who sent that order, but they come up with several ideas: it was Augustus’ own instruction, it was Tiberius (though he denied it), it was Livia who made the fateful decision.
Enough suspicion surrounded the death of Postumus that a couple of years later, an impostor came forward, claiming to be Postumus and trying to raise support. It is a familiar story to anyone who has followed the fates of the various Pretenders during Henry VII’s reign. The sources generally assign this to Postumus’ ex-slave, Clemens, and the attempt was short-lived.
Postumus was only 26 when he died. We don’t know how much he wanted to be the centre of attention, a focus for hopeful insurgents, someone too dangerous to be allowed to live in prison on a tiny island. In the end, the picture is a sad one of a young man who had spent his life disappointing his grandfather and only wanting to fish.
Fiona Forsyth is the author of Death and the Poet, the second instalment of The Publius Ovidius Mysteries, published by Sharpe Books.
