The incident was ominous of the future, when all the powers of the state were concentrated in the august person of the emperor. He was the representative and embodiment of the limitless sovereignty of the people, whose irresponsible authority was transferred to him. The rules and formularies which had regulated the exercise of power, so long as it belonged to the people, were feeble barriers to the passions and fears of Cæsarism. Accordingly, a principle soon became engrafted in Roman jurisprudence that, in all cases of _crimen majestatis_, or high treason, the free citizen could be tortured. In striking at the ruler he had forfeited all rights, and the safety of the state, as embodied in the emperor, was to be preserved at every sacrifice. The emperors were not long in discovering and exercising their power. When the plot of Sejanus was discovered, the historian relates that Tiberius abandoned himself so entirely to the task of examining by torture the suspected accomplices of the conspiracy, that when an old Rhodian friend, who had come to visit him on a special invitation, was announced to him, the preoccupied tyrant absently ordered him to be placed on the rack, and on discovering the blunder had him quietly put to death, to silence all complaints. The shuddering inhabitants pointed out a spot in Capri where he indulged in these terrible pursuits, and where the miserable victims of his wrath were cast into the sea before his eyes, after having exhausted his ingenuity in exquisite torments.[1386] When the master of the world took this fearful delight in human agony, it may readily be imagined that law and custom offered little protection to the defenceless subject, and Tiberius was not the only one who relished these inhuman pleasures. The half-insane Caligula found that the torture of criminals by the side of his dinner-table lent a keener zest to his revels, and even the timid and the beastly Claudius made it a point to be present on such occasions.[1387] Under the stimulus of such hideous appetites, capricious and irresponsible cruelty was able to give a wide extension to the law of treason. If victims were wanted to gratify the whims of the monarch or the hate of his creatures, it was easy to find an offender or to make a crime. Under Tiberius, a citizen removed the head from a statue of Augustus, intending to replace it with another. Interrogated before the Senate, he prevaricated, and was promptly put to the torture. Encouraged by this, the most fanciful interpretation was given to violations of the respect assumed to be due to the late emperor. To undress one’s self or to beat a slave near his image; to carry into a latrine or a house of ill fame a coin or a ring impressed with his sacred features; to criticize any act or word of his became a treasonable offence; and finally an unlucky wight was actually put to death for allowing the slaves on his farm to pay him honors on the anniversary which had been sacred to Augustus.[1388]