With the death of the two Cæsars the hopes of Tiberius blossomed anew. Hence it is not improbable that they died of poison, administered at the criminal instigations of Livia. Even contemporaries nourished this suspicion. The passionate nature of the empress, who shrank from no crime however heinous, was well known, as was also the revengeful and spiteful temper of her eldest son, who had returned to Rome shortly before the death of Caius, and now did all he could to step into the vacant place. The mother’s intrigues and the son’s flattering arts of dissimulation did actually succeed to some extent in overcoming the emperor’s aversion to his stepson. He received him into favour and graciously acceded to Livia’s proud hopes and desires by adopting him and admitting him into the Julian family. Julia, the granddaughter of Augustus, who resembled her mother in beauty, in wit, as well as in levity and voluptuousness, and the younger Agrippa (styled Postumus, because Julia had brought him into the world after the death of her husband), a turbulent youth of haughty and intractable disposition, rude manners, and violent passions, were no formidable rivals to the artful Livia and her malevolent son. When Agrippa’s outbreaks of fury were carried so far that neither the emperor nor the empress were spared by them, the latter contrived that the thoughtless and ungovernable youth, though adopted by Augustus at the same time as Tiberius, should be kept under military supervision in the little island of Planasia; where Tiberius had put him out of the way in the first year of his reign by assassins despatched for the purpose, alleging instruction left by the deceased emperor as his excuse. The younger Julia was banished on the pretext of an illicit amour with Decius Silanus, to a desolate island in the neighbourhood of Apulia, and compelled to pass the rest of her days--twenty long years--in exile. [Sidenote: [9-14 A.D.]] Fortune, which had stood by Augustus faithfully throughout his public career and had led him by many thorny paths to the summit of earthly glory, deserted him in his private life and in his domestic circle. Hatred and envy, fanned by female passions, ranged his court in two hostile factions, which employed against each other all the weapons of intrigue and all the arts of treachery and dissimulation, and scared peace and harmony away from the apartments of the imperial palace.