ant, and among his other doings he proposed
for consul Gaius, who was not yet a iuvenis. His father, however,
expressed the earnest wish that no such complication of circumstances
might arise as once occurred in his own case,--that any one younger than
twenty should be consul. When the people still remained urgent he then
said that a man ought to receive this office at time when he would not be
liable to error himself and could resist the passions of the populace.
After that he gave Gaius a priesthood, with the right of attendance in
the senate and of beholding spectacles and sitting at banquets with that
body. And wishing in some way [6] to rebuke them still more severely he
bestowed upon Tiberius the tribunician authority for five years, and
assigned to him Armenia, which was becoming estranged since the death of
Tigranes. The result was that he was soon at odds with the people and
Tiberius, though without effecting anything. The people felt that they
had been slighted, and Tiberius feared their anger. He was, however, soon
sent to Rhodes on the pretext that he needed some education; and he
took not even his entire retinue, to say nothing of others, that so his
appearance and his deeds might drop out of their minds. [The trip he made
as a private person except in so far as he compelled the Parians to
sell him the statue of Vesta, that it might be placed in the temple of
Concord. When he reached the island he neither behaved at all nor spoke
in an overweening way.--This is the truest reason for his foreign
journey.] There is also a story current that he did this on account of
his wife Julia, because he could no longer endure her; at any rate she
was left behind at Rome. [Others have said that he was angry at not
having been designated Caesar. Others still, that he was driven out by
Augustus, being accused of plotting against the latter's children. But
that his departure was not for the sake of education nor because he was
displeased at the decrees passed became plain from many of his subsequent
actions, and especially through his immediately opening his will at that
time, and reading it to his mother and to Augustus. But all possible
conjectures were made.]

[B.C. 5 (_a. u._ 749)]

The following year Augustus in the course of his twelfth consulship
placed Gaius among the iuvenes and at the same time brought him
before the senate, declared him Princeps luventutis, and allowed
him to become cavalry commander.