was exemplified in the
ruin of Sabinus, a loyal friend of the house of Germanicus. The
unfortunate man was tricked into speaking bitterly of Sejanus and
Tiberius. Three senators were actually hidden above the ceiling of the
room where he was entrapped into uttering unguarded phrases, and on this
evidence he was condemned.

The death of the aged Livia Augusta removed the last check on the
influence of Sejanus.

[The account of his two years of unqualified supremacy, and of his
sudden and utter overthrow has been lost, two books of the "Annals"
being missing here.]

From this time, the life of Tiberius at Caprae was one of morbid and
nameless debauchery. The condition of his mind may be inferred from the
opening words of one of his letters to the senate. "If I know what to
write, how to write it, what not to write, may the gods and goddesses
destroy me with a worse misery than the death I feel myself dying
daily." The end came when Macro, the prefect of the Praetorians, who, to
save his own life and secure the succession of Gaius Caesar Caligula, the
surviving son of Germanicus, caused the old emperor to be smothered.

[The record of the next ten years--the reign of Caligula, and the first
years of Claudius--is lost. When the story is taken up again, the wife
of Claudius, the infamous Messalina, was at the zenith of her evil
career.]

While the doting pedant Claudius was adding new letters to the alphabet,
Messalina was parading with utter shamelessness her last and fatal
passion for Silius, and went so far as publicly to marry her paramour.
It was the freedman Narcissus who made the outrageous truth known to
Claudius, and practically terrorised him into striking. Half measures
were impossible; a swarm of Messalina's accomplices in vice were put to
death. To her, Claudius showed signs of relenting; but Narcissus gave
the orders for her death without his knowledge. When they told Claudius
that she was dead, he displayed no emotion, but went on with his dinner,
and apparently forgot the whole matter.

A new wife had to be provided; Agrippina, the daughter of Germanicus,
niece of Claudius himself, and mother of the boy Domitius, who was to
become the emperor Nero, was the choice of the freedman Pallas, and
proved the successful candidate. Shortly after, her new husband adopted
Nero formally as his son. It was not long before she had assumed an air
of equality with her husband; and all men saw that she intended him to