Exile
In AD 6, an uprising began in the Roman province of Illyricum. Augustus sent Tiberius to crush the revolt with his army, and after a year of delayed results, he sent Germanicus in his capacity as quaestor to assist in bringing the war to a swift end. The reason, Dio says, that Germanicus was chosen over Postumus is because Postumus was of an "illiberal nature".
Postumus was known for being brutish, insolent, stubborn and potentially violent. He possessed great physical strength and reportedly showed little interest in anything other than fishing. He resisted all efforts to improve his behavior, which forced Augustus to "abdicate" him from the Julii in AD 6 and banish him to a villa at Surrentum, near Pompeii. As an abdicated adoptee (adoptatus abdicatus), he lost the Julian name and returned to the gens Vipsania. The ancient historian Velleius Paterculus had this to say of the banishment:
The following year, in 7 AD, Augustus had the Senate make Postumus' banishment permanent and had him moved to Planasia (now Pianosa, Italy), a small island between Italy and Corsica. Augustus bolstered the natural inaccessibility of the rocky island by having an armed guard installed there. The Senate was ordered never to allow his release.
No consensus has emerged as to why Augustus banished Postumus. Tacitus suggests that Augustus' wife, Livia, had always disliked and shunned Postumus, as he stood in the way of her son Tiberius succeeding to power after Augustus since Postumus was a direct biological descendant of Augustus, unlike Tiberius. Some modern historians theorise that Postumus may have become involved in a conspiracy against Augustus. Postumus was held under intense security.
Postumus' sister Julia was banished around the same time (AD 8), and her husband, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, was executed for allegedly plotting a conspiracy against Augustus. There was later a conspiracy to rescue Julia and Postumus by Lucius Audasius and Asinius Epicadus. Audasius was an accused forger of advanced age, and Asinius was half-Illyrian. According to Suetonius, Audasius and Epicadus had planned to take Julia and Postumus by force to the armies. It is unclear what their exact plan was or even to which armies Suetonius was referring because the conspiracy was discovered early in its planning, possibly before they had even left Rome.