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By Root 10035 0

Sejanus. Tiberius himself cross-examined the senator, asking what he meant by "unsafe", and to whom, in his opinion, the epigram referred. The senator shuffled and would not give direct answers. Tiberius then said that many libels had been current when he was a younger man, all accusing him of being a drunkard, and that in recent years he had been ordered by his doctors to abstain from wine because of a tendency to gout, and that several libels had lately been published accusing him of bloodthirstiness. He asked the accused whether he was not aware of these facts, and whether he thought that the epigram could refer to anyone but his Emperor. The wretched man agreed that he had heard the libels on Tiberius' drunkenness but knew them to have no foundation in truth and had not made any connection in his mind between them and the one on his gate. He was then asked why he had not reported the former libels to the Senate as it was his duty to do. He answered that when he had heard them it was not yet a punishable offence to utter or repeat any epigram, however scurrilous, written against anyone, however virtuous; nor treason to utter or repeat scurrilities directed even against Augustus so long as one did not publish them in writing.

Tiberius asked to what time he referred, for Augustus had late in life made an edict against scurrilities too. The senator answered: "It was during your third year at Rhodes."

Tiberius cried out, "My Lords, how can you permit this fellow to insult me so?" So the Senate actually condemned him to be thrown down the Tarpeian cliff, a punishment ordinarily reserved for the worst traitors—generals who sold battles to the enemy, and such-like.

Another man, a knight, was put to death for writing a tragedy about King Agamemnon in which Agamemnon's queen, who murdered him in his bath, cried as she swung the axe: "Know, bloody tyrant, 'tis no crime T'avenge my wrongs like this."

Tiberius said that he was intended by the character Agamemnon and that the line quoted was an incitement to assassinate him. So the tragedy, which everyone had laughed at because it was so lamely and wretchedly composed, won a sort of dignity by having all its copies called in and burned and its author executed.

This prosecution was followed two years later—but I put it down here because the Agamemnon story reminds me of it—by that of Cremutius Cordus, an old man who had come into collision with Sejanus some time before over a trifle. Sejanus entering the House one wet day had hung his cloak on the peg which had always been Cremutius', and Cremutius, when he came in, not knowing that it was Sejanus' cloak, had moved it to another peg to make room for his own. Sejanus' cloak had fallen down from this new peg and somebody with muddy sandals had trampled on it. Sejanus retaliated in a variety of malicious ways, and Cremutius came so to loathe the sight of his face and the sound of his name that when he heard that Sejanus' statue had been set up on the Theatre of Pompey he exclaimed: "That just about ruins the Theatre". So now he was named to Tiberius as one of Agrippina's principal adherents. But as he was a venerable, mild old man who had no enemy in the world but Sejanus and never spoke a word more than necessary, it was difficult to support any accusation against him with evidence that even a brow-beaten Senate could decently accept. In the end Cremutius was charged with having written in praise of Brutus and Cassius, the murderers of Julius Caesar. The evidence produced was an historical work which he had written thirty years before and which Augustus himself, Julius' adopted son, was known to have included in his private library and occasionally consulted.

Cremutius made a spirited defence against this absurd charge, saying that Brutus and Cassius had been dead so long and had been so frequently praised for their deed by subsequent historians that he could not believe that the trial was not a hoax—such a hoax as a young traveller recently suffered in the city of Larissa. This young man was publicly accused of having murdered