When at last, therefore, certain persons,—Fulcinius Trio, Vitellius, and Veranius,—incited by public opinion, by the friends of Germanicus, who cried for vengeance, and by Agrippina, who would hear of no mercy, decided to accuse Piso and Plancina of poison, as well as Piso and his son Marcius of having tried to stir up civil war, Tiberius found himself in a most grave dilemma. It seems that trials such as these, involving persons of the highest rank and acts of a political character, could not be set in motion without the approval of the Emperor, who had the additional privilege of deciding whether the case should come before the ordinary tribunal,—the jury, as in trials of Verres and Clodius,—or whether he ought to entrust it instead to the Senate. Tiberius did not believe in the imputation of poison, which was the only really grave charge brought against Piso,—the other charge, that of civil war, being more in the nature of a second string. He did not believe in the poison charge, just as no sensible and impartial man believed in it, just as Tacitus, years later, did not believe in it, even though, with his usual malice, he has done all he could to induce posterity to accept it as true. Tiberius did not believe in it, for not only was there no proof of the charge itself, but it was in itself absurd. In fact, the accusers, when forced to explain when and in what way Piso had poisoned Germanicus, had found themselves reduced to asserting that, at a banquet to which Germanicus had invited Piso, and at which Piso was seated at a considerable distance from Germanicus, Piso, at a moment when Germanicus was looking in another direction, had poured the poison into his wine, actually in the midst of his host’s numerous servants and in the presence of the guests! This story may be taken as a sample of the whole accusation. Tiberius then knew that the charge was a romance, created and magnified by the political and partisan enmities which amongst the Roman nobility were so violent, by the credulity of the public, by the unreasoning hatred the people felt towards himself and the supreme authority with which he had been invested. He would, therefore, gladly have cut the trial short at the very beginning.