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In consequence, no one was free from the suspicion of his neighbours or even of his own family. No more ingenious device has been invented to subjugate a whole population, to paralyze its intellect, and to reduce it to blind obedience. It elevated delation to the rank of high religious duty.
Though eloquence was not what it had been, it still remained the highest career that an ambitious man could adopt. Even under the tyrants it had served as the keenest weapon of attack, the surest buckler of defence. The public accusation, which had once been the stepping-stone to fame, had changed its name, and become delation.
In a few short months, by a campaign of delation and espionage, he had completely disorganized the army, the only really national institution left in France.
"Isaac Orobio, a Jewish physician, related to Limborch the manner in which he had himself been tortured, when thrown into the inquisition at Seville, on the delation of a Moorish servant, whom he had punished for theft, and of another person similarly offended.
Nero's private excesses and debaucheries developed, while the horrible system of delation flourished, and prosecutions for treason abounded. About this time the emperor's passion for Poppæa Sabina, the wife of Otho, became the source of later disaster. Beautiful, brilliant, utterly immoral, but complete mistress of her passions, she had married Nero's boon companion.
Ministers irresponsible; officials without sense of public obligation; venality in all ranks; universal suspicion and delation; violent remedies, such as the Armenian massacres of 1894, for diseases due to neglect; the peasantry, whether Moslem or Christian, but especially Christian, forced ultimately to liquidate all accounts; impoverishment of the whole empire by the improvidence and oppression of the central power such phrasing of the conventional results of 'Palace' government expresses inadequately the fruits of Yildiz under Abdul Hamid II.
Since he who could bring a criminal to justice received a fourth of his possessions and estates, and since it brought the accuser into prominence, delation was recklessly indulged in by the unscrupulous, both for the sake of gain and as a means of venting personal spite. The vice lay at the very heart of the Roman system, and was not the invention of Tiberius.
"Only you know," said Bothwell, still playing with the purse, "that every landholder is answerable for the conformity and loyalty of his household, and that these fellows of mine are not obliged to be silent on the subject of the fine sermon we have had from that old puritan in the tartan plaid there; and I presume you are aware that the consequences of delation will be a heavy fine before the council."
Sejanus was thus in a fair way to the ends of his ambition: to be named the successor to the Principate. Then Tiberius found him out; and sent a message to a senate engaged in Sejanus-worship, demanding the punishment of the murderers of Drusus. Sejanus had built up his power by fostering the system of delation.
Some rumours reached de Molay of the delation made by the Toulousian prisoners, but the pope reassured him in an interview, April 1307, and lulled him into security. On 14th September of the same year the royal officers of the realm were ordered to hold themselves armed for secret service on 12th October, and sealed letters were handed to them to be opened that night.
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