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By Root 9892 0

up the rate of interest in the first place, and now there was a financial panic and land-values fell to nothing. Tiberius was eventually forced to relieve the situation by lending the bankers a million gold pieces of public money, without interest, to pay out to borrowers in exchange for securities in land. He would not even have done this much but for Cocceius Nerva's advice. He still used occasionally to consult Nerva who, living at Capri, where he was kept carefully away from the scene of Tiberius' debauches and allowed little news from Rome, was perhaps the only man in the world who still believed in Tiberius' goodness. To Nerva [Caligula told me some years later] Tiberius explained his painted favourites as poor orphans on whom he had taken pity, most of them a little queer in the head, which accounted for the funny way they dressed and behaved. But could Nerva really have been so simple as to have believed this, and so shortsighted?

XXVIII

OF THE LAST FIVE YEARS OF TIBERIUS' REIGN the less told the better. I cannot bear to write in detail of Nero, slowly starved to death; or of Agrippina, who was cheered by news of Sejanus' fall, but when she saw that it made matters no better for her refused to eat, and was forcibly fed for awhile, and then at last left to die as she wished; or of Gallus, who died of a consumption; or of Drusus who, removed some time before from his attic in the Palace to a dark cellar, was found dead with his mouth full of the flock from his mattress, which he had been gnawing in his starvation. But I must record at least that Tiberius wrote letters to the Senate rejoicing in the death of Agrippina and Nero—he accused her now of treason and of adultery with Gallus—and regretting, in the case of Gallus, that "the press of public business had constantly postponed his trial so that he had died before his guilt could be proved".

As for Drusus, he wrote that this young man was the lewdest and most treacherous rascal he had ever encountered. He ordered a record to be publicly read, by the Guards captain who had been in charge of him, of the treasonable remarks which Drusus had uttered while in prison. Never had such a painful document been read in the House before. It was clear from Drusus' remarks that he had been beaten and tortured and insulted by the captain himself, by common soldiers and even by slaves, and that he had very cruelly been given every day less and less food and drink, crumb by crumb, and drop by drop. Tiberius even ordered the captain to read Drusus' dying curse.

It was a wild but well-composed imprecation, accusing Tiberius of miserliness, treachery, obscene filthmess and delight in torture, of murdering Germanicus and Postumus, and of a whole series of other crimes [most of which he had committed but none of which had ever been publicly mentioned before]; he prayed the Gods that all the immeasurable suffering and distress that Tiberius had caused others should weigh upon him with increasing strength, waking or sleeping, night and day, for as long as he lived, should overwhelm him in the hour of his death, and should commit him to everlasting torture in the day of infernal Judgment.

The senators interrupted the reading with exclamations of pretended horror at Drusus' treason, but these oh, oh's and groans covered their amazement that Tiberius should voluntarily provide such a revelation of his own wickedness.

Tiberius was very sorry for himself at the time [I heard afterwards from Caligula], tormented by insomnia and superstitious fears; and actually counted on the Senate's sympathy. He told Caligula with tears in his eyes that the killing of his relatives had been forced on him by their own ambition and by the policy that he had inherited from Augustus [he said Augustus, not Livia] of putting the tranquillity of the realm before private sentiment. Caligula, who had never shown the slightest signs of grief or anger at Tiberius' treatment of his mother or brothers, condoled with the old man; and then quickly began telling him of a new sort of vice that he had heard about