After exalting Sejanus to a high pinnacle of glory and making him a member of his family by the alliance with Julia, daughter of Drusus, Tiberius later killed him.

[-4-] Now Sejanus was growing greater and more formidable all the time, and his progress made the senators and the rest look up to him as if he were actually emperor and esteem Tiberius lightly.  When Tiberius learned this, he did not regard the matter as a trivial one, fearing, indeed, that they would hail his rival as emperor outright, and he did not neglect it.  Yet he did nothing openly, for Sejanus had won the entire pretorian guard thoroughly to his own side and had gained the favor of the senators partly by benefits, partly by implanting hopes, and partly by intimidation.  He had made all the attendants on Tiberius so entirely his friends that absolutely everything the emperor did was at once reported to him, whereas of what he did not a word reached Tiberius’s ears.  Hence the latter appeared content to follow where Sejanus led, appointed him consul, and termed him Sharer of his Cares, repeating often the phrase “My Sejanus,” and publishing the same by writing it to the senate and the people.  Men took this behavior as sincere and were deceived, and so set up bronze statues all about to both alike, wrote their names together in bulletins, and brought into the theatres gilded chairs for both.  Finally it was voted that they should together be made consuls every four years and that a body of citizens should go out to meet both alike whenever they entered Rome.  In the end they sacrificed to the images of Sejanus as to those of Tiberius.  This was the way matters stood with Sejanus.  Now among the rest many famous men met an ill fate, of whom was also Gaius Fufius Geminus.  Being accused of the crime of maiestas against Tiberius he took his will into the senate-chamber and read it, showing that he had left his inheritance in equal portions to his children and to his sovereign.  As he was charged with weakness he went home before any vote was reached.  When he learned that the quaestor had arrived to attend to his execution, he wounded himself and displaying the wound to the official exclaimed:  “Report to the senate that it is thus one dies who is a man.”  Likewise, his wife, Mutilia Prisca, against whom some complaint was made, made her way into the senate and there stabbed herself with a dagger, which she had brought in secretly.

Next he destroyed Mutilia and her husband together with two daughters on account of her friendship for his mother.

In the days of Tiberius all who accused any persons regularly received money and large allotments both from the victims’ property and from the public treasury in addition to various honors.  There were cases where certain men who impudently threw others into a panic or recklessly passed the death sentence upon them obtained in the one instance statues and in the other triumphal honors.  Hence several citizens who were really illustrious and conquered the right to some such distinction would not assume it out of reluctance to let any period of their lives betray even a superficial similarity to the careers of those scoundrels.