When the ceremony was over, Agrippina gathered up the ashes and started with her youngest children for Rome. Meanwhile the Senators and other officials who had been in the train of Germanicus treated the Province of Syria as though it were vacant, and appointed Gnæus Sentius, one of their number, Governor in the place of Piso. There was no time to send to Rome for orders. Germanicus had cashiered Piso, but had died before appointing his successor, and it was necessary that there should be some one in authority, in case Piso returned and attempted to resume the government of Syria. Piso had travelled on his homeward journey as far as Cos, when the news of the death of Germanicus reached him. He made thanksgiving offerings to the gods, and Plancina, who had recently lost a sister, threw off her mourning. Consultations were held as to the best course to pursue. Marcus Piso, the younger of his two sons, urged his father to return to Rome. So far he had done nothing unpardonable, but an attempt to resume the government of the province meant nothing less than civil war. Other and less prudent friends advised Piso not to recognize the appointment of Sentius, and to rely on his popularity with the legions. Tacitus puts into the mouth of these advisers the following astounding statement, which he probably found in those memoirs of Agrippina which are not evidence: “You have the complicity of Livia, the favour of Cæsar though hidden, and none mourn more loudly for Germanicus than those who are best pleased at his death.” Piso and Plancina proved to have miscalculated the affection of the legions, and an attempt to recover Syria by force was defeated by Sentius, who gave the unhappy candidate for power ships and a safe conduct to Rome. Agrippina meanwhile had traversed the seas and arrived at Brundisium with the vase containing her husband’s ashes early in the year 20 A.D. The illness and death of Germanicus had excited much feeling in the city and Italy, though we are not bound to believe in the dark suggestions of the historian that the populace had assumed the complicity of Tiberius in his nephew’s death. The widow made the best of her affliction, and contrived to give the procession to the Mausoleum of Augustus, in which her husband’s ashes were deposited, the aspect of a public demonstration in favour of the Julian race. Neither Tiberius himself, nor Livia, nor even the mother of Germanicus, were present at this ceremony. Doubtless they had sufficient reasons, but their absence unfortunately favoured the credulity of those who at a later time listened to the lamentations of Agrippina, and her passionate assertions that her husband had been done to death with the connivance of his own kith and kin.