Except that soon there would be three. Livilla, the sister of Germanicus and Claudius, was a woman whose husbands had always been characterised by their great expectations. The first had been Augustus’s grandson, Gaius; the second her own cousin, Drusus. An ugly duckling as a child, she had grown up a famous beauty, commended to the Senate by her husband as his ‘best beloved’.62 Tiberius too had reason to value her: in the grim weeks that followed Germanicus’s death, she had provided her uncle with a brief respite from the crisis by giving birth to twin boys. Livilla, though, was decidedly not a woman to bring harmony where there was discord. As a child, she had been notably spiteful, mocking her younger brother Claudius for his disabilities – and as an adult, she would prove no less malevolent. Fractious, flighty, and bitterly resentful of anyone who threatened her children’s prospects, she combined a roving eye with a deep capacity for hatred. By AD 23, only a couple of years after her husband had publicly praised her to his fellow senators, their marriage was in crisis. Drusus himself, whose taste for fast living had never left him, and whose brutality was so pointed that sharp swords were called ‘Drusian’ in his honour, appeared to be entering into a sharp decline. Hot-tempered and violent, he was increasingly the worse for drink. At one point, at a party with Sejanus, his erstwhile partner in the suppression of the Pannonian mutiny, he had lost his temper and punched the Praetorian prefect in the face. His father, alarmed, began to worry for his health. Then, in September, Drusus fell seriously ill. By the 14th, he was dead.
Twice, first with the loss of Agrippa, then with that of Gaius, Augustus had been poleaxed by such a blow. Tiberius, frozen-faced as ever, scorned to betray his grief. Arriving in the Senate House, he calmed the ostentatious displays of mourning. ‘I look for a sterner solace. I keep the Republic in my heart.’ Even so, there could be no disguising the scale of the calamity that had befallen him and his plans. Bluntly, the Princeps spelt out the implications to his fellow senators. He had been banking upon Drusus, he explained, to mould and train Germanicus’s sons, who bore in their veins, thanks to their mother, the blood of the deified Augustus. Ushering in Caligula’s two elder brothers, Nero and Drusus, Tiberius commended them to the House. ‘Adopt and guide these young men – these offspring of an incomparable bloodline.’63 It was a raw and painful moment. Tiberius’s increasing sense of exhaustion; his longing for a partnership that might help to alleviate it; his yearning to believe that loyalty to Augustus might yet be squared with the traditions of the Republic: all were laid bare. When the Princeps ended his address by promising, in a tone of high emotion, to restore to the consuls the reins of power, he may even have believed what he was saying.
If so, however, it was only for a moment. Tiberius’s words were met in the Senate House with sullen scepticism. His listeners had heard it all before. Tiberius too, after a decade of struggling to educate senators in what he expected from them, had begun to despair of their partnership. ‘Men readied for slavery,’64 he had taken to muttering under his breath as he left the House. Hardly surprising, then, with Drusus dead and the Senate a broken reed, that Tiberius should have begun to cast around elsewhere for support. Heir of the Claudians though he might be, he did not scorn the ambitions of the upwardly mobile – provided only that they were able. Men of the meanest origins imaginable, even men rumoured to have been fathered by slaves, had been known to get Tiberius’s backing. ‘His achievements,’ so the Princeps observed of one such parvenu, a gladiator’s son who would eventually rise to become governor of Africa, ‘are paternity enough.’65 The more isolated and weary Tiberius came to feel, the more cause he had to value such servants. This was why, in the desolating aftermath of Drusus’s death, he did not turn to one of his own bloodline for succour, nor to one of the companions of his youth, nor to anyone in the Senate House, but to a mere equestrian, an Etrurian from a drab and provincial background: Lucius Aelius Sejanus.
Even while Drusus was alive, Tiberius had been honouring the Praetorian prefect with marks of favour. Other people brought him problems; Sejanus brought him solutions. When Pompey’s great theatre caught fire, it was the Praetorians who rushed to fight the flames and prevent them spreading; in recognition of this, and in obedience to Tiberius’s evident wishes, the Senate voted to honour the Prefect with a bronze statue in the rebuilt complex. Naturally, the majority of senators did so through gritted teeth, but there were sufficient of them alert to the shifting tides of influence, or who had been admitted to the Senate by Sejanus’s influence, to provide the Prefect with a potent faction. By AD 23, the year of Drusus’s death, he had begun to establish himself even more decisively as the coming man. In the north-easternmost corner of Rome, on one of the highest vantage points in the city, workmen had been labouring for two years on a massive construction project. Walls of brick-faced concrete and gateways bristling with towers sheltered within them a massive grid of barracks: the unmistakable stamp, branded onto the very fabric of Rome, of a legionary camp. No longer, under Sejanus’s prefecture, were the Praetorians to be scattered across the city. The days of veiling their existence were over. Instead, concentrated within a single fortress, and commanded by officers appointed by the Prefect himself, they were now directly in the capital’s face. Equestrian Sejanus may have been, but what magistracy was there open to a senator that could compare for sheer intimidating menace with command of the Praetorian camp?
Sejanus himself, though, was painfully aware that his power as yet rested on shifting sands. He held no magistracy, was not even a senator. His authority was no more legally grounded than that of Maecenas had been. Without Tiberius he would be nothing – and Tiberius was sixty-five. The death of Drusus, though, had enabled Sejanus to glimpse a dazzling opportunity: the chance to establish himself, not as a Maecenas, but as an Agrippa. The August Family, now that Tiberius had lost his son, consisted principally of untested boys. Were the Princeps himself now to die in turn, there would be an urgent need for someone to serve as regent to his heir. After all, as Tiberius himself had openly acknowledged to the Senate, Germanicus’s sons would never prove worthy of their descent from Augustus without attentive grooming. Sejanus, skilled as he was in the near impossible task of reading his master’s thoughts and fathoming the many ambivalences that characterised them, had long since recognised the paradox that lay buried in their depths. Between Tiberius’s devotion to the Senate as he imagined it should be, and his contempt for it as it actually was, existed an irreconcilable tension. To an operator as penetrating and subtle as Sejanus, there lurked here a tantalising opportunity. The faith that Tiberius had so publicly expressed in the Senate as the guardian of young Nero and Drusus was a precarious thing. Confidence and suspicion, in the Emperor’s mind, were merely different sides of the same coin. Admiration for the codes of his class, for the traditions of the Senate, for the legacy of the Republic: all might easily be corrupted. The task of perverting Tiberius’s instincts, and playing upon all that was most paranoid in his complex and mistrustful mind, was one for which Sejanus, in the event, would prove lethally fitted.
The key to the Prefect’s strategy was Agrippina. Haughty, combustible, and impatient to see her sons elevated to the rank that she believed appropriate to their lineage, everything about her served to rub Tiberius up the wrong way. When Sejanus whispered in his master’s ear that her ambitions were breeding factionalism in the Senate, just as those of her mother had once done, the Princeps was inclined to believe it. The first open flashpoint between the two came early in January 24. It was the turning point of the Roman year, and Janus, the god after whom the month was named, served as its gatekeeper. Two faces he had: one gazing backwards, at time past, and one looking fixedly into the future. An appropriate moment, then, for priests to offer up prayers for the safety of the Princeps. That particular year, though, there was a change to the formula. The names of Agrippina’s two eldest sons, Nero and Drusus, were mentioned alongside that of the Emperor. Tiberius exploded. When he demanded to know of the priests whether the boys had been included at their mother’s request, they flatly denied it; but the Princeps was barely mollified. The sinister precedent of the teenage Gaius and Lucius, shamefully over-promoted decades previously, still weighed on his mind. In a speech to the Senate, Tiberius sternly warned against spoiling the young princes. Agrippina, meanwhile, was only confirmed in her resentment of him. Relations between the two turned icier still.