that of obedience to their new commander. By the time when the ceremony was over, the Senate had risen, and the body of Sejanus was being dragged about the streets. No sooner had it become apparent that Sejanus was disgraced and no longer enjoyed the favour of the Emperor than the long smouldering hostility to the upstart broke out into a blaze of fury. Tiberius was given no time for repentance or consideration; the fallen favourite was judged and executed on the spot; his two children were similarly condemned and executed; his friends were sought out and assassinated. For some hours, if not for some days, there was a veritable reign of terror at Rome, whose horrors the Emperor in his distant retirement did not at first surmise, and when informed was powerless to check. This was the end of the careful restoration of the Senate planned by Augustus and fostered by Tiberius, an outbreak of violence which recalled the days of the Gracchi and the proscriptions. Tiberius did not long remain inactive; order was restored, and judicial prosecutions took the place of unlicensed murders. To the Emperor himself the change to law and order brought but little comfort, rather a deeper depth of despair. The whole story of the plots of Livilla and Sejanus, as it was then believed, was revealed. Apicata, the divorced wife of Sejanus, gave possibly tainted evidence of the machinations by which the death of Drusus, the son of Tiberius, had been brought about. Tiberius found that he had been the accomplice of the murderer of his own son, and that in banishing Agrippina and Nero he had played into the hands of that unnatural son and brother the other Drusus. Many of his old and intimate friends were implicated with Sejanus; there had been a conspiracy of silence, if not an active partisanship, and it was difficult to determine the degrees of guilt. In spite of so many years of public service and of single-hearted devotion to the interests of others, Tiberius found that at the age of seventy-two he stood alone in the world, hated and mistrusted by all. After the first shock, the vigour of the old man returned; he checked the indiscriminate persecution of the friends of Sejanus, and he did his best to secure for them a fair trial. The Empire itself was not shaken by the blow, the effects of which did not extend beyond the city of Rome and Italy; but it must have been a grievous wound to his sensitive nature to discover that his oldest friends did not trust him, and that even such a tried associate as Asinius Gallus followed the example of the many weak-minded men who preferred suicide to facing an inquiry into their conduct. Prosecutions in connection with the Sejanus conspiracy seem to have continued for four years, but the order of events is not quite certain. It is not probable that Tiberius gave orders three years after the event to execute all the prisoners together without further hearing.