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He was misguided by his freedmen and the retainers to his house; who eager to be masters of power, animated him with intemperate counsels; "that he would show a spirit resolute and assured; it was what the Roman People wished, what the armies longed for: nor would Sejanus dare then to resist; though he now equally insulted the tameness of an old man and the sloth of a young one."
But the son did not suffice, and Sejanus therefore succeeded in making himself, together with Drusus, in fact, if not in name, the first and most active and influential collaborator and counselor of Tiberius.
Thus one thief obtained payment of the debt which was not due to him, the other a quittance of which he had no need, and my master became possessed of the horse, which was as fatal to him as the famous Sejanus was to his owners. The successive owners of this animal were Seius, Dollabella, Cassius, and Anthony. The first of them was executed, the rest committed suicide.
It was to no purpose that Fox compared the lords to the Janissaries of a Turkish Sultan, and the king's letter to Temple, to the rescript in which Tiberius ordered the upright Sejanus to be destroyed. Ministers were dismissed, the young Pitt was installed in their place, and the Whigs were ruined.
His long life reached from before the outbreak of war between Caesar and Pompeius till after the death of Tiberius. His only extant work, a collection of themes treated in the schools of rhetoric, was written in his old age, after the fall of Sejanus, and bears witness to the amazing power of memory which he tells us himself was, when in its prime, absolutely unique.
The disgrace and death of Sejanus seem to have brought a relief from actual persecution to the Alexandrian Jews; but the ill-will between the two races in the city smouldered on, and it only required a weakening of the controlling hand at Rome to set the passions aflame again. Right through Philo's treatise "On the Confusion of Tongues," we can trace the tension.
A citizen of Bern or Amsterdam, in this respect, is equal to Sejanus, Ximenes, Buckingham, Richelieu, or Mazarin; but our conduct and our enterprises depend absolutely on our natural dispositions, and our success depends upon fortune."
True, the son of Germanicus was not yet on the throne; but he soon would be; and Agrippa was rash enough to call the Emperor a superannuated old fellow, and even to wish for his death. Sejanus was now dead and gone; but there was no want of spies: and a certain Macro reported his words to Tiberius.
Besides these, and many other less known comedies, Jonson wrote two great tragedies, Sejanus and Catiline , upon severe classical lines. After ceasing his work for the stage, Jonson wrote many masques in honor of James I and of Queen Anne, to be played amid elaborate scenery by the gentlemen of the court.
There was another reason too, of which he said nothing; but it was easily understood: Blesus was uncle to Sejanus, and therefore had the prevailing interest. Blesus too made a show of refusing, but not with the like positiveness, and was heard with partiality by the flatterers of power. The same year the cities of Gaul, stimulated by their excessive debts, began a rebellion.
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