The youngest son of Julia, Agrippa Postumus, had, as we have already recorded, been banished to the Island of Planasia off the coast of Campania, and detained in captivity. He was the last of the grandsons of Augustus. At this time he was about twenty-six years of age, and would in the ordinary course of events have held appointments and been pushed forward like his brothers. This had not been done. The historians agree in ascribing to him a stubborn disinclination to study, and an evil temper; he was put out of the way as Claudius was put out of the way; but he continued to be to some extent the centre of Julian plots, and it was believed that, in spite of his bad manners, Augustus was personally attached to him. It is possible that his name had been used in the plots with which his sister, the younger Julia, and her husband, L. Æmilius Paulus, had been concerned; or that he had taken up his mother’s quarrel with Tiberius, and had disturbed the serenity of the Imperial household. Although he had been thus set aside, Augustus had been sufficiently anxious about his welfare to request Tiberius to adopt him, when he himself adopted Tiberius. Whatever may have been the real temper and the real pretensions of the young man, one thing is certain: immediately after the death of Augustus he was put to death upon his island, and the centurion on guard reported to Tiberius that his orders had been obeyed. Tiberius at once denied that he had given any orders, and added that he would report the matter to the Senate. No report was ever made, and Tacitus tells us that Tiberius was over-persuaded by C. Sallustius Crispus, who had succeeded Mæcenas as confidential and unofficial adviser to the Cæsarian family. Crispus is said to have urged that any public inquiry into the matter would have created too much scandal. Tiberius was not the man to be deterred from doing what he considered a public duty by any consideration of what he might himself suffer, but there was another person whose good name was likely to be damaged, and whose responsibility for what had occurred it would be awkward to demonstrate; that person was his mother, Livia. Tiberius himself had no motive for committing such a crime; only the perverse inconsistency of a Roman historian could be capable of attributing to the same man reluctance to accept power, and complicity in a crime whose object was to secure the undisturbed enjoyment of that power. Whoever was responsible for the death of Agrippa Postumus, Tiberius certainly was not; but Livia, the friend of Herod, whose life had been spent in pushing the fortunes of the Claudians, was not a woman to be frightened by the murder of an inconvenient aspirant.