СНАР. XLV. informers, the decimater of the senate, advanced to the sovereignty of the Roman people was ascribed to the ambition, the arts, and the crimes of the AD. 29. unfortunate Livia. The proscriptions were forgotten in fifty years, the delations never. A. U.782. CHAP. A. D. 29. to the senate pina and Nero. CHAP. XLVI. THE FATE OF THE FAMILY OF GERMANICUS.—BANISHMENT OF - DISGRACE AND IMPRISON MENT OF HER SON DRUSUS. — - PERSECUTION OF HER FRIENDS. PROSCRIPTION OF HIS ADHERENTS. -VENGEANCE FOR THE MURDER OF DRUSUS. -SAVAGE CRUELTY OF TIBERIUS. HORRIBLE DEATH OF THE YOUNGER DRUSUS. -AGRIPPINA STARVES HERSELF. -INFATUATION OF TIBERIUS. -HIS MORTIFICATION AT THE DESPONDENCY OF THE NOBLES. -VOLUNTARY DEATHS OF NERVA AND ARRUNTius. -PROSOF THE SUCCESSION.-CAIUS CALIGULA AND THE YOUNG TIBERIUS.—ASCENDENCY OF MACRO. LAST DAYS AND PECTS DEATH OF TIBERIUS (A. U. 790.). — EFFECTS OF THE REIGN WELL CARED FOR AND PROSPEROUS. GENERALLY EXAMPLE FROM THE STATE OF JUDEA. (A.D. 29—†37., THE first incident which marked the withdrawal of XLVI. A. U. 782. manicus, had nevertheless exerted herself, not СНАР. without success, to shield it from ruin. The emperor now complained in bitter terms of the A.D. 29. alleged misconduct of his grand-nephew; not, indeed, of any political intrigues to his own prejudice, but of personal vices and dissoluteness: against the chaste matron, his mother, he had not ventured to utter even such imputations as these, but had confined himself to reproving once more the vehemence so often remarked in her language and demeanour. The senators were thrown into great perplexity: ready as they were to carry out the commands of their master, however atrocious they might be, they dared not act upon murmurs which conveyed no express order, and made no demand upon their active interference. While they deliberated, however, warned by one of their own body to take no hasty step in so delicate a matter, the people assembled before the doors of the Curia, and bearing aloft the effigies of their favourites, shouted aloud that the letter itself was an abominable forgery, and the lives of the emperor's nearest kindred were menaced without his knowledge, and in manifest defiance of his inclinations. These cries evidently pointed at Sejanus as the contriver of a foul conspiracy; but the favourite, perceiving his danger, played dexterously upon his master's fears, representing the movement of the populace as an act of rebellion, the images of Nero and Agrippina as the standards of a civil war, till he wrung from him a second proclamation, in which the impetuosity of the citizens was sternly rebuked, the tardiness of the senate more mildly reproved, CHAP. A. D. 29. A. U. 782. They are islands. and the charges against the culprits repeated, with a distinct injunction to proceed at once to consider them with due formality.1 Thus encouraged and stimulated to take the part banished to assigned them, the senators had no scruple in declaring that they had only been withheld from a more zealous defence of the imperial majesty by the want of definite instructions. Sejanus triumphed; accusers sprang up at his beck; the process was carried through, we may believe, with all the reckless disregard of decency and justice for which the tribunal of the Conscript Fathers had long been infamous; and though we have lost the details of it, we know that its result was fatal to its unfortunate victims, and that both the mother and son were banished to barren islands, the one to Pandateria, the other to Pontia. True to the indomitable ferocity of her character, the she-wolf Agrippina resisted the atrocious mandate with violence, and in her struggle with the centurion in whose charge she was placed, such was the horrid story which obtained credence with the citizens, one of her eyes was actually struck from her head.2 Sejanus now urged his success with redoubled energy. He had removed his two most conspicuous rivals to an exile from which the members of the imperial family had never yet been known to return. Drusus still remained, of an age and character to Sejanus ob- compete with him in the career of his ambition. disgrace of Tiberius retained the youthful prince, together with the younger his younger brother Caius, about his own person at Capreæ: there was the more reason to fear the tains the Drusus. 1 Tac. Ann. v. 5., A. u. 782. From this point there is a lacuna of two years in the annals of Tacitus. 2 Suet. Tib. 53. СНАР. XLVI. favour he might acquire with his aged relative; nor were there the same opportunities for misrepresenting his conduct, or urging him by means A. D. 30. of insidious advisers into political intrigues. But A.U. 783. Sejanus, in seducing the affections of the young prince's consort, Lepida, found the means of undermining his credit with the emperor. His shameless paramour was easily induced by his representations, and the same promise, perhaps, of marriage, which he had already extended to the wife of another Drusus, to excite the jealousy of Tiberius against the unfortunate prince; and thus even the recesses of the imperial retirement, in which the old man had sought to bury himself from the crimes and follies of the world he hated, were opened to the machinations of his most intimate friends and relatives. Drusus was dismissed from Capreæ, and ordered to repair to Rome in disgrace. But Sejanus was not satisfied with this indication of the sovereign's anger: fearing lest his master might change his mind about the culprit, he induced the consul Cassius Longinus to make a motion in the senate on the young man's presumed misconduct; and the fathers hastened to respond to it by declaring him an enemy of his country. Drusus was immediately placed under arrest; but the privileges of a Roman noble still exempted him from confinement in the dungeons of the Mamertine prison, and he was thrust, in mockery of the free custody which was his legal right, into a subterranean chamber of the imperial palace.1 | Suet. Tib. 54.; Dion, lviii. 3., a. u. 783. At this point there is a short break in the remains of Dion's history. |