The first overt act of insubordination on the part of Piso was a neglect to forward some cohorts to Germanicus in Armenia. On the return of Germanicus he met Piso, and an attempt to adjust their mutual differences was rendered ineffective by the mischievous offices of friends. Germanicus himself was inclined to take a lenient view, but he was influenced by the suggestions of those who told him exaggerated stories about Piso and his sons and Plancina. A private conference was held, but the two men left it open enemies. After this Piso publicly resented all honours paid to Germanicus, and Plancina was particularly annoyed because her somewhat lucrative protégé Vonones, a former aspirant to the Parthian crown, was removed by Germanicus at the request of the Parthians to a safer distance from the frontier. Germanicus finding that the best part of his work was accomplished, and that life in Syria was not pleasant, made a tour in Egypt, going up the Nile as far as Elephantine and Syene, then the limit of Roman rule. It is pleasing to find him visiting the same sights that attract the modern traveller, over whom he had an advantage in that the priests were able to read the inscriptions for him. In visiting Egypt, Germanicus inadvertently broke a decree of Augustus, which forbade any Roman Senator or Equestrian to enter that private domain of the Emperor without special permission. Tiberius had written to bring this to his notice, but the letter arrived too late. On returning from his holiday tour in Egypt, Germanicus found that all his arrangements in Syria had been reversed by Piso, his disposition of the legions had been changed, and his formal alliances with the cities modified. Stormy scenes followed, and Piso decided to leave Syria, so says our narrative; but the more probable order of events is that Piso was ordered by Germanicus to withdraw, and was at Seleucia on his way home when news reached him of the illness of Germanicus. We are not told the nature of this illness. Agrippina and possibly Germanicus himself jumped to the conclusion that poison and spells were the cause of the sickness. Horrible things were found in the house; fragments of human remains embedded in the floors and walls; bits of parchment covered with spells; leaden tablets inscribed with the name of Germanicus, and other mystic apparatus with which it was customary to consign the spirit of an enemy to the shades. The illness seems to have been a lingering one. Piso hovered off the coast, approaching or withdrawing as the symptoms were declared to be better or worse. In the end Germanicus died. Agrippina and her friends were so fully persuaded that he had been the victim of poison or witchcraft, that they exposed his body naked in the market place at Antioch, confident that the flames of the funeral pyre would fail to devour his heart, for it was well known that the heart of a man who had been poisoned was incombustible.