Sensing his opportunity, Sejanus made sure not to waste it. His priority, if he were to isolate Agrippina and weaken her hold over her sons, was to destroy her allies in the Senate. Naturally, under a Princeps as respectful of legal proprieties as Tiberius, there could be no question of resorting to open violence in pursuit of this goal – but Sejanus had no need to do so. It was the law itself which constituted his weapon of choice. Over the course of the year, a number of prominent men who had seen service with Germanicus were brought to trial by the Prefect’s allies in the Senate. The charges ranged from extortion to maiestas. One committed suicide before a verdict could be reached; others were dispatched into exile. Nothing about the process ranked remotely as unconstitutional. The law courts had always been an arena in which the great manoeuvred for advantage. The ability to sway judges was a talent that had been the making of many an ambitious senator. Although to defend a man from the hounding of his enemies was traditionally regarded as the more honourable course for an orator to take, no disgrace attached itself to prosecution. Tiberius, who had himself secured the conviction of a would-be assassin of Augustus when only twenty, certainly saw nothing untoward about it. ‘It is perfectly acceptable to bring prosecutions, just so long as it is done as a service to the Republic, in the cause of bringing down its enemies.’66 How, then, could the Princeps fail to approve what was hallowed by both tradition and his own example?
Sejanus, though, with his pathologist’s eye, had penetrated more deeply into the changed circumstances of the age than his master. The law, long cherished by senators as the bulwark of their liberty, now promised the man ruthless enough to exploit it the perfect opportunity to terrorise even the boldest among the elite into abject submission. The irony of this was peculiarly bitter. What had delivered the Senate into Sejanus’s hands was an innovation originally designed to enhance its dignity. Once, back in the rumbustious days of the Republic, trials of the great had been a public entertainment, staged before the full gaze of the Roman people – but no longer. Instead, under Augustus, senators had been granted leave to sit in judgement on their own, in the privacy of the Senate House. At the time, they had greeted this as a novel and welcome burnishing of their status. Now, too late, they found that it had been a trap. The senator sitting in judgement on a peer accused of treason against the Princeps could not help but feel exposed. His vote was bound to be monitored. So too the enthusiasm with which he pushed for conviction. The more splenetically he demanded punishment, the more would his loyalty be noted. Sejanus had no need to bully his enemies into silence. He could leave senators themselves to do that. Paranoia and ambition would combine to keep them all at one another’s throats.
Nevertheless, keen to rub his message home, the Prefect made sure to demonstrate what the penalty for any outspokenness would be. First, the inveterately abrasive Cassius Severus, who had been exiled to Crete in the dying days of Augustus’s reign, was retried and sentenced to an altogether bleaker prison: a tiny rock in the Aegean. Then, the following year, came an even more ominous development. Back in 22, when the Senate had voted to place a statue of Sejanus in Pompey’s theatre, only one senator, a noted historian by the name of Cremutius Cordus, had dared to protest. Now, three years on, the Prefect unleashed his attack dogs. The charge against Cremutius was a novel and chilling one: that in his history he had praised Brutus and Cassius, and named them ‘the last of the Romans’.67 When the wretched historian, rising to his feet, protested to his fellow senators that the liberty to praise the dead, no matter who they were, was an ancient birthright of their city, and one that Augustus himself had personally sanctioned, Sejanus’s agents howled him down. ‘And as they barked at him, he knew himself cornered.’68 Leaving the Senate, Cremutius headed directly home. There, he starved himself to death. An application by the prosecution that he be force-fed, the better to inflict on him an edifying punishment, was registered too late with the consuls to be put into effect. His books, by official decree of the Senate, were burned.
The fate of Cremutius, destroyed because of what he had written about the past, offered to senators the glimpse of a terrifying future. It was one in which every bond of citizenship, every link of friendship, every web of favour and obligation, threatened a snare. A shared confidence at a dinner party, a snatch of conversation in the Forum: risk suddenly lurked everywhere. ‘To comment on anything was to risk prosecution.’69 Familiarity, in such a world, was a kind of infection.
The gods clearly agreed. As though in mockery of the new spirit of dread abroad in the Senate, they now sent to Italy a disease that spared the masses, and women of every class as well, but struck devastatingly at men of the elite. Manifesting itself first as an inflammation of the chin, before going on to cover the entire face and upper body ‘with a hideous scale’,70 it was spread by their habit of kissing. Mentagra, Tiberius termed it, grimly humorous as ever – ‘gout of the chin’.71 By an official edict, he forbade citizens to give one another even the most innocuous peck upon the cheek. Gestures that once had served to celebrate a shared union now spelt only danger. The more intimate a relationship, the more it threatened calamity. The Roman upper classes knew themselves disfigured, blighted, sick.
So too, looking in the mirror, did the Princeps himself. Bald and bent with age, his face had grown ulcerous with sores. Whether it was mentagra itself that had come to afflict him, or some other ailment, Tiberius needed no reminder of how treacherous close contacts might be. Within his own household, attempts to patch over the various rivalries and hatreds festering within the August Family were barely more effectual than the plasters that speckled his face. No moment so sacred, no moment so intimate, that it might not start to suppurate.
Even a sacrifice raised to Augustus was capable of being ruined. It was Agrippina, bursting in on her uncle as he was seeking the favour of his deified predecessor, who desecrated one such ritual. Distraught that yet another of her intimates was being brought to trial, she laid the blame, not on Sejanus, but on Tiberius himself. The sight of her uncle standing before a statue of her grandfather, his head piously covered by his toga as befitted a priest, drove Agrippina into a paroxysm of fury. ‘A man who offers up victims to the god Augustus,’ she spat, ‘ought not to be persecuting his descendants! You think that his divine spirit has been interfused into mute stone? No, if you want his true semblance, then look for it in me – a woman with his heavenly blood in her veins!’ Tiberius only fixed Agrippina with a baleful gaze, then reached out and held her with his skinny hand. ‘So,’ he hissed, ‘you think that your not being in power means you suffer persecution?’72