Not that Sejanus was alone in appreciating this. Livilla, who had enjoyed Agrippina’s downfall as much as anyone, was fully alert to the ally she had in the Prefect. The prospect of seeing her son as Princeps, over the heads of Nero, Drusus and Caligula, was one calculated to delight her envious and ambitious spirit. Already she had played an enthusiastic part in Sejanus’s schemes. Her daughter, Gemellus’s elder sister, had been married to Nero, and on Livilla’s instructions had served the Prefect as his eyes and ears. Just as Sabinus had been doomed by spies in his attic, so Nero had been betrayed in his bed. There was nowhere, it seemed, beyond the Prefect’s reach.
Yet even as his fellow citizens, cringing before his fame and power, began to pay him honours so extravagant that they seemed to cast him, not as the servant of the Princeps, but as his partner, Sejanus never forgot how precarious the foundations of his greatness remained. That his statues were paired with those of Tiberius; that formal delegations had taken to meeting him at the city gates whenever he returned to Rome; that some had even begun to offer sacrifices to his image, almost as though he were the DeifiedAugustus himself: none of this deceived the Prefect. His fortunes still hung by a thread. Without the favour of Tiberius, he would be nothing. A year on from the downfall of Agrippina, a fresh triumph over her sons served, by a frustrating irony, only to emphasise this all the more. The same dirty tricks that had done for Nero now secured the condemnation of Drusus as well. The suborning of the young man’s wife, the briefings against him by security agents, the slanders whispered in his grand-uncle’s ear by Sejanus himself, proved more than sufficient to doom him. Proclaimed by the Senate a public enemy, as his elder brother had been, Drusus was immured in a dungeon on the Palatine. Now, with only Caligula standing between Gemellus and the succession, Sejanus had ultimate victory almost in his grasp. Almost – but not quite. Caligula, who had been staying with his grandmother, Antonia, after the death of the Augusta, was summoned by Tiberius to Capri. There, of course, he was effectively beyond the Prefect’s reach. That Caligula himself was as much the hostage as the guest of his great-uncle helped Sejanus not at all. To frame a young man directly under Tiberius’s nose was an almost impossible challenge – even for a practitioner in the arts of disinformation as seasoned as the Prefect.
What, though, if he could end his dependence on the patronage of his master? In Rome, a shift in the balance of power between the two men was increasingly bruited. Tiberius, absent from the capital for four years, had begun to seem to many a shrunken and faded figure – ‘the lord of an island, nothing more’.85 The Prefect himself knew better; but he also knew that his patron, weary of Rome and weary of life, would not be around for ever. Time was running out. Having come so far, Sejanus could no longer depend for his future prospects upon the favour of a sick and aged man. To win he would have to dare.
When news reached Rome that Nero, transported to a penal island the year before, was dead, few failed to detect the hand of the Prefect in his miserable and squalid end. A guard, it was rumoured, had appeared before the prisoner, brandishing a noose and a butcher’s hook; and Nero, rather than suffer himself to be murdered, had committed suicide. Whether true or not, it added to the aura of menace that clung to Sejanus: the man who commanded access to the Princeps, who had built a legionary camp directly overlooking Rome, who had deployed terror more blatantly in the city than anyone since the darkest days of the Triumvirate. Yet even as he intimidated the Roman people, he made sure to woo them as well. When Tiberius, in a telling mark of favour, arranged for him to become consul and agreed to serve as his partner, Sejanus naturally revelled in his official status as the colleague of the Princeps. Now at last he was a senator; now at last he wielded power that was legally sanctioned. Simultaneously, though, as a man who had risen from provincial obscurity to dizzying heights, his election provided him with the perfect opportunity to pose as something more: as a man of the people. After the formal vote in the Senate House, the new consul-elect staged a flamboyant parade around the Aventine, the hill of the plebs. Here, in a pointed echo of the elections on the Campus banned by Tiberius, he hosted an assembly. The potential insult to his master was massive – but Sejanus was content to take the risk. Princeps, Praetorians, people: he needed them all.
By 31, the year in which he entered his consulship, the Prefect could feel confident that all his schemes, all his manoeuvrings, all his ambitions were close to fruition. Although Caligula, infuriatingly, remained at liberty, the sense that Tiberius was finally ready to take the decisive step and reveal his long-term plans for his ‘partner in toil’86 began to build with the heat of summer. That spring, bidding his deputy farewell after a consultation with him on Capri, the Princeps had freely expressed his devotion, hugging his deputy tightly and declaring that he could as easily spare his own body and soul as Sejanus. Still, though, even as rumour and counter-rumour swept Rome, no definitive statement arrived in the sweltering city.
Summer turned to autumn. The Prefect continued to sweat. Finally, on 18 October, the long-awaited moment arrived. It was dawn. As Sejanus, standing on the steps of the great temple of Apollo, where the Senate was due to meet that day, gazed out from the Palatine at the waking city, he was joined by a fellow prefect. One-time commander of the city’s firefighters, the Vigiles, Sutorius Macro had just come from Capri – and he bore with him a letter from the Princeps. It was addressed to the new consul, Memmius Regulus, a trusted henchman of Tiberius who had taken office only three weeks before, and was presiding over the Senate that same morning. In strictest confidence, Macro revealed the letter’s contents to his commander. Sejanus was to be given the tribunicia potestas, the privileges of a tribune. Momentous news indeed. Back in the days of Augustus, first Agrippa and then Tiberius himself had been granted the identical bundle of powers – and on both occasions, it had served to mark the respective men as the partner of Augustus’s labours. Unsurprisingly, then, Sejanus was as delighted as he was relieved. As he hurried inside the temple, the look on his face was one that everyone could read. Cheers greeted him, and bursts of applause. When he took his place, senators flocked to sit beside him, eager to bask in his glory. Macro, meanwhile, handed over the letter from Tiberius to Regulus. Then he turned and left. Sejanus, listening impatiently to the letter as the consul began to read it out, did not bother to wonder where he might be headed.
Tiberius, of course, had never been a man to cut to the chase. Nevertheless, as senators listened to Regulus read out his letter, they found themselves growing perplexed. Far from praising Sejanus, the Princeps seemed to have only criticisms of his colleague. The placemen who had bunched themselves around him began to inch nervously away. Sejanus himself, listening in consternation, could not move – for various magistrates had stepped forward to block his path. Only after Regulus had ordered him three times to stand did he finally rise to his feet – by which stage it was clear to everyone that Tiberius had cut his deputy loose. When the consul ordered Sejanus to be led from the chamber and incarcerated in the same prison that had once held Sabinus, no one attempted to defend him. As news of the Prefect’s downfall swept across Rome, crowds began to mass in the Forum, booing and jeering the prisoner, and toppling his statues as he was dragged past them in chains. When Sejanus sought to cover his head with his toga, they yanked it off him and began punching and slapping him about the face. So much for his attempts to woo the Roman people. Worse than a failure, they had cost him the backing of his patron.