erit 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 powerf