Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 9, 2025
The manner in which he maintained his horse will give some idea of his domestic extravagance. He built a stable of marble, and a manger of ivory; and whenever the animal, which he called Incita'tus, was to run in the race, he placed sentinels near its stable, the night preceding, to prevent its slumbers from being broken. Questions for Examination. What was the first measure of Sejanus?
Advice of Sejanus's proceedings was soon carried to the emperor at Capri; his indignation was immediately excited; and with a confidence founded upon an authority exercised for several years, he sent orders for accusing Sejanus before the senate.
Before the impressions of this grief were worn away, the death of Agrippina was published. I suppose she had lived thus long upon the hopes, which from the execution of Sejanus she had conceived; but, feeling afterwards no relaxation of cruelty, death grew her choice: unless she were bereaved of nourishment, and her decease feigned to have been of her own seeking.
Meanwhile, he was upon the watch, from the summit of a lofty cliff, for the signals which he had ordered to be made if any thing occurred, lest the messengers should be tardy. Even when he had quite foiled the conspiracy of Sejanus, he was still haunted as much as ever with fears and apprehensions, insomuch that he never once stirred out of the Villa Jovis for nine months after.
He was even more active and influential than Drusus, for the latter was frequently absent on distant military missions to the confines of the empire, while Sejanus, as commander of the pretorian guard, was virtually always at Rome, where the emperor now appeared less and less frequently.
Tell him I have back the money, even the six talents, he robbed me of by robbing my father's estate; tell him I survived the galleys to which he had me sent, and in my strength rejoice in his beggary and dishonor; tell him I think the affliction of body which he has from my hand is the curse of our Lord God of Israel upon him more fit than death for his crimes against the helpless; tell him my mother and sister whom he had sent to a cell in Antonia that they might die of leprosy, are alive and well, thanks to the power of the Nazarene whom you so despise; tell him that, to fill my measure of happiness, they are restored to me, and that I will go hence to their love, and find in it more than compensation for the impure passions which you leave me to take to him; tell him this for your comfort, O cunning incarnate, as much as his tell him that when the Lord Sejanus comes to despoil me he will find nothing; for the inheritance I had from the duumvir, including the villa by Misenum, has been sold, and the money from the sale is out of reach, afloat in the marts of the world as bills of exchange; and that this house and the goods and merchandise and the ships and caravans with which Simonides plies his commerce with such princely profits are covered by imperial safeguards a wise head having found the price of the favor, and the Lord Sejanus preferring a reasonable gain in the way of gift to much gain fished from pools of blood and wrong; tell him if all this were not so, if the money and property were all mine, yet should he not have the least part of it, for when he finds our Jewish bills, and forces them to give up their values, there is yet another resort left me a deed of gift to Caesar so much, O Egypt, I found out in the atria of the great capital; tell him that along with my defiance I do not send him a curse in words, but, as a better expression of my undying hate, I send him one who will prove to him the sum of all curses; and when he looks at you repeating this my message, daughter of Balthasar, his Roman shrewdness will tell him all I mean.
What inducement the author had to this dedication, we know not; but as it is evident from a passage in the ninth book, that the compliment was paid after the death of Sejanus, and consequently in the most shameful period of Tiberius's reign, we cannot entertain any high opinion of the independent spirit of Valerius Maximus, who could submit to flatter a tyrant, in the zenith of infamy and detestation.
Amusing the Roman people is a fine art; getting the money to keep them amused is another art even finer; and was there ever an artist the equal of the Lord Sejanus?" Ben-Hur was not too much stirred by the evident baseness of the woman for recollection. Not unfrequently when all the other faculties are numb and failing memory does its offices with the greatest fidelity.
We see, however, that the great majority of conspirators have been persons of position and the familiars of their prince, and that their plots have been as often the consequence of excessive indulgence as of excessive injury; as when Perennius conspired against Commodus, Plautianus against Severus, and Sejanus against Tiberius; all of whom had been raised by their masters to such wealth, honours, and dignities, that nothing seemed wanting to their authority save the imperial name.
Sejanus, though simply a Roman knight, was descended from an illustrious family, and was, in the very beginning of Tiberius's reign, associated with his father in the command of the prætorian guards.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking