Dio's Rome, Volume 4: An Historical Narrative Originally Composed in Greek During the Reigns of Septimius Severus, Geta and Caracalla, Macrinus, Elagabalus and Alexander Severus: and Now Presented in English FormCassius Dio Cocceianus
History
Dio's Rome, Volume 4: An Historical Narrative Originally Composed in Greek During the Reigns of Septimius Severus, Geta and Caracalla, Macrinus, Elagabalus and Alexander Severus: and Now Presented in English Form
Cassius Dio Cocceianus
Rome -- History
and did, and further made them his assistants by promises of marriage.
Now when Tiberius without discussion sent Drusus to Rome, Sejanus,
fearing that his position might be injured, persuaded Cassius [2] to busy
himself against him.]
After exalting Sejanus to a high pinnacle of glory and making him a
member of his family by the alliance with Julia, daughter of Drusus,
Tiberius later killed him.
[-4-] Now Sejanus was growing greater and more formidable all the time,
and his progress made the senators and the rest look up to him as if he
were actually emperor and esteem Tiberius lightly. When Tiberius learned
this, he did not regard the matter as a trivial one, fearing, indeed,
that they would hail his rival as emperor outright, and he did not
neglect it. Yet he did nothing openly, for Sejanus had won the entire
pretorian guard thoroughly to his own side and had gained the favor of
the senators partly by benefits, partly by implanting hopes, and partly
by intimidation. He had made all the attendants on Tiberius so entirely
his friends that absolutely everything the emperor did was at once
reported to him, whereas of what he did not a word reached Tiberius's
ears. Hence the latter appeared content to follow where Sejanus led,
appointed him consul, and termed him Sharer of his Cares, repeating often
the phrase "My Sejanus," and publishing the same by writing it to the
senate and the people. Men took this behavior as sincere and were
deceived, and so set up bronze statues all about to both alike, wrote
their names together in bulletins, and brought into the theatres gilded
chairs for both. Finally it was voted that they should together be made
consuls every four years and that a body of citizens should go out to
meet both alike whenever they entered Rome. In the end they sacrificed to
the images of Sejanus as to those of Tiberius. This was the way matters
stood with Sejanus. Now among the rest many famous men met an ill fate,
of whom was also Gaius Fufius Geminus. Being accused of the crime of
maiestas against Tiberius he took his will into the senate-chamber and
read it, showing that he had left his inheritance in equal portions to
his children and to his sovereign. As he was charged with weakness he
went home before any vote was reached. When he learned that the quæstor
had arrived to attend to his execution, he wounded himself and displaying
the wound to the official exclaimed: "Report to the senate that it is
thus one dies who is a man." Likewise, his wife, Mutilia Prisca, against
whom some complaint was made, made her way into the senate and there
stabbed herself with a dagger, which she had brought in secretly.
Next he destroyed Mutilia and her husband together with two daughters on
account of her friendship for his mother.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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