The story as it has been handed down to us, so far as it can be collected from fragmentary documents, is to the following effect. Sejanus formed designs upon the succession at a comparatively early period; after the death of Germanicus one man alone, Drusus, stood between him and the object of his ambition. In order to compass the destruction of Drusus, Sejanus, a man certainly past fifty years of age, if not close upon sixty, laid siege to Livilla, the wife of Drusus, the sister of Germanicus. Successful in his assaults upon her not impenetrable chastity, he divorced his wife Apicata, and joined with Livilla and a favourite freedman of Drusus in a conspiracy. Drusus, according to the story, did not die a natural death; he was poisoned by Sejanus through the instrumentality of his favourite Lygdus. The way to the succession now lay clear, for the son of Drusus was still a child, and the eldest sons of Germanicus were little older; moreover, it was supposed that Tiberius disliked the family of Germanicus. To the disappointment of Sejanus, Tiberius showed an inclination to favour this family, and though he sharply reproved the Senate for attempting to confer premature honours upon them, he introduced them to the Senate, and as they advanced in years treated them as his probable successors along with his own grandson. Sejanus then, we are told, by means of secret emissaries worked upon the excitable temperament of Agrippina in the hope that she would involve herself and her family in ruin by committing some unpardonable offence against Tiberius. In this he was eventually successful, though so long as Tiberius continued to live at Rome the violence of Agrippina was met by somewhat amused contempt. Thus it is recorded that on one occasion Agrippina, goaded by the agents of Sejanus, burst in upon Tiberius when he was sacrificing in presence of the statue of Augustus. The scene is brought home to us if we imagine that the famous statue of the Prima Porta found on the site of Livia’s villa was the statue in question. A friend, and indeed cousin, of Agrippina’s, one Claudia Pulchra, had been accused of unchastity and of magical performances directed against the Emperor himself. It was suggested to Agrippina that she was the person really attacked, and being “always violent,” as Tacitus says, she went straight to the Emperor, and, in allusion to the solemn occupation in which she found him engaged, declared that “a man had no right to offer victims to the sainted Augustus and at the same time persecute his posterity. The divine spirit had not passed into dumb images, but his real presentment, born of his divine blood, understood the inconsistency, and mourned.” She went on to describe the attack upon Claudia as an attack upon herself. Tiberius for once was provoked to a retort, and, quoting a Greek poet, said, “Your only injury, daughter, is that you are not Queen.” This scene in the calm presence of the statue of Augustus was followed by another.