of his adopted son or even through actual complicity in the crime. He could not and would not attach himself, however, to the mob which cried for Piso’s head, innocent or guilty. He was too haughty and too serious a man to descend to such baseness. Recognise that public opinion was a force of which account must be taken,—this he was prepared to do; pander to it like a slave, at the cost of honour and justice,—no. Rarely had a Roman Emperor found himself placed, by the suspicions of the public, by the mad passions of the people, by the perfidious malevolence of the cabals and _coteries_, in a more difficult position. The six days that elapsed between the prosecution and the defence must have been thorny days for Tiberius. Inasmuch as a nod from him could weigh down the scales, both parties tried to influence him. Piso and his friends worked to induce him and Livia to make up their minds to intervene openly in the Senate on behalf of outraged innocence. The other side endeavoured to frighten him. They accused Tiberius _sotto voce_ of having favoured Piso unjustly in his speech to the Senate, in which he had already assumed the charge of poisoning to be untrue. They circulated the story of the compromising letter in Piso’s possession which the latter threatened to read in the Senate, if Tiberius did not help him. Meanwhile Agrippina was filling Rome with her lamentations and imprecations, and the public agitation was increasing. Cries were heard on every side that Germanicus must be avenged. Piso’s position was tragic. But Tiberius would not depart from the line of conduct, that of impartiality, which he had marked out for himself—hoping, perhaps, that the trial would furnish him sooner or later with an opportunity of preserving justice without laying himself open to suspicions of too debasing a nature. He allowed Livia, however, to interest herself openly in behalf of Plancina against whom also charges were levelled; and Livia’s intervention might be indirectly of service to Piso, as it made it clear, to those who cared to see, that Germanicus’s own grandmother did not believe in the charge of poisoning.