nd
butchered in the presence of their parents; virgins, without any imputed
guilt, were sacrificed to a similar destiny; but there being an ancient
custom of not strangling females in that situation, they were first
deflowered by the executioner, and afterwards strangled, as if an
atrocious addition to cruelty could sanction the exercise of it. Fathers
were constrained by violence to witness the death of their own children;
and even the tears of a mother, at the execution of her child, were
punished as a capital offence. Some extraordinary calamities, occasioned
by accident, added to the horrors of the reign. A great number of houses
on Mount Caelius were destroyed by fire; and by the fall of a temporary
building at Fidenae, erected for the purpose of exhibiting public shows,
about twenty thousand persons were either greatly hurt, or crushed to
death in the rains.

By another fire which afterwards broke out, a part of the Circus was
destroyed, with the numerous buildings on Mount Aventine. The only act
of munificence displayed by Tiberius during his reign, was upon the
occasion of those fires, when, to qualify the severity of his government,
he indemnified the most considerable sufferers for the loss they had
sustained.

Through the whole of his life, Tiberius seems to have conducted himself
with a uniform repugnance to nature. Affable on a few occasions, but in
general averse to society, he indulged, from his earliest years, a
moroseness of disposition, which counterfeited the appearance of austere
virtue; and in the decline of life, when it is common to reform from
juvenile indiscretions, he launched forth into excesses, of a kind the
most unnatural and most detestable. Considering the vicious passions
which had ever brooded in his heart, it may seem surprising that he
restrained himself within the bounds of decency during so many years
after his accession; but though utterly destitute of reverence or
affection for his mother, he still felt, during her life, a filial awe
upon his mind: and after her death, he was actuated by a slavish fear of
Sejanus, until at last political necessity absolved him likewise from
this restraint. These checks being both removed, (247) he rioted without
any control, either from sentiment or authority.

Pliny relates, that the art of making glass malleable was actually
discovered under the reign of Tiberius, and that the shop and tools of
the artist were destroyed, lest, by the e