as well.  Such as accused or offered testimony against persons divided by lot the property of those convicted and received in addition both offices and honors.  In the case of many he took care to ascertain the day and the hour that they had been born and on the basis of their character and fortune thus investigated would put them to death.  If he discovered any qualities of haughtiness and aspiration to power in any one, he despatched him whether or no.  Yet so much did he investigate and understand what was fated for each of the prominent men that on meeting Galba (subsequently emperor), when the latter had betrothed a wife, he remarked:  “You also shall taste of the sovereignty.”  He spared him, as I conjecture, because this was settled as his fate; but, as he explained it himself, because Galba would reign only in old age and long after his death.

[Tiberius also found some pretexts for assassinations.  The death of Germanicus led to the destruction of many others on the ground that they were pleased at it.]

The man who cooeperated with him and helped him in all his undertakings with the utmost zeal was Lucius Aelius Sejanus, a son of Strabo, and formerly a favorite of Marcus Gabius Apicius,—­that Apicius who so surpassed all mankind in voluptuous living that when he had once desired to learn how much he had already spent and how much he still had, on finding that two hundred and fifty myriads were left him became grief-stricken, feeling that he was destined to die of hunger, and took his own life.  This Sejanus, accordingly, at one time shared his father’s command of the Pretorians.  After his father had been sent to Egypt, and he obtained entire control, he made the force more compact in many ways, gathering within one fortification the cohorts, which had been separate and apart from one another like those of the night guardsmen.  In this way the entire body could receive the orders speedily and they were a source of terror to all, because they were within one fortification.  This was the man whom Tiberius, because of the similarity of their characters, took as his helper, elevating him to praetorial honors, which had never yet been accorded to any of his peers; and he made him his adviser and assistant in all matters. [In fine, he changed so much after the death of Germanicus that whereas previously he was highly praised, he now attracted even greater wonder.]

[A.D.21 (a. u. 774)]

[-20-] When Tiberius began to hold the consular office in company with Drusus, men immediately began to prophecy destruction for Drusus from this very circumstance.  For there is not a man who was ever consul with Tiberius that did not meet a violent death, but in the first place there was Quintilius Varus, and next Gnaeus Piso, and then Germanicus himself, who perished violently and miserably.  The emperor was evidently doomed to cause such ruin throughout his life:  Drusus, his colleague at this time, and Sejanus, who subsequently participated in the office, also came to grief.