As a matter of fact, on this occasion as on many subsequent occasions, the Senators lost their heads; they, and not Tiberius, were responsible for the excesses of the sentence and the subsequent transactions. The fear of magic was strong upon them, as their subsequent action in driving the practisers of magic arts from Italy demonstrates. They did not succeed in doing so, and similar equally futile senatorial decrees recur again and again. These solemn rulers of the world behaved like little children in their terror of the black art; they believed in incantations, divinations, signs and wonders, spells and imprecations far more strongly than they did in the precepts of the Stoic and the Epicurean. Here and there we find one of the ancients superior to the prevailing superstitions, but only here and there; and in the Roman palaces, no less than at the court of Louis XIV., the plotter and the poisoner were hand in hand with the crafty charlatans, or self-deceived miracle workers, who haunted the private apartments of men and women of rank. Tiberius could not have resisted the panic of the Senate on this occasion, even if he had had the opportunity; we shall find magic a couple of years later playing an important part in a more notable prosecution. Libo was evidently a profligate fool, and not likely to have been implicated in a serious plot; but it is not impertinent to ask where Tacitus got his detailed information; the case is hardly mentioned by other authors. The scene of the suicide is graphic, the authority whom Tacitus uses is clearly in sympathy with Libo. Now Libo was, as we have seen, related to the Julians, and it is at least probable that a version of the story was supplied by a correspondent to Agrippina, who was at the time in Germany, and so became incorporated in the memoirs which she handed down to her daughter, who again used it in the memoirs which Tacitus tells us that he saw. The two “mathematicians” who were summarily punished suffered different penalties: Pituarius was thrown from the Tarpeian rock, Marcius was proceeded against “in the manner of our forefathers”; the trumpet was sounded, calling the centuries to the Campus Martius, the unhappy man was then bound to a stake, and beaten with rods till he was dead, after which his head was cut off; these privileges he enjoyed as being a Roman citizen infected with a foreign superstition. It is to be hoped that he really was a charlatan, and not a genuine man of science, who paid the common penalty for being in advance of his age. XV Germanicus and Piso