Tiberius, particularly in the face of the persistent and insidious intrigues and accusations of the party of Agrippina.  The guard lived at Rome, in continual contact with the senate and the imperial house.  Everything which was said in the senatorial circles or in the palaces of the emperor or of his relatives was quickly repeated among the cohorts, and the memory of Drusus and Germanicus was deeply venerated by the pretorians.  If the guard could have been persuaded that the emperor was a poisoner of his kindred, their loyalty would have been exposed to numberless intrigues and attempts at seduction.  In such a condition of affairs, a commander of the guard who could inspire Tiberius with a complete and absolute trust might easily acquire a great influence over him.  Sejanus knew how to inspire this trust.  This was partly by reason of his origin, for the equestrian order, on account of its ancient rivalry with the senatorial nobility, was more favorably inclined than the latter toward the imperial authority; and partly also on account of certain reforms which he had succeeded in introducing into the pretorian guard.

[Illustration:  A Roman feast in the time of the Caesars.]

Once he had acquired the emperor’s confidence, the ambitious and intelligent prefect of the pretorians proceeded to render himself indispensable in all things.  The moment was favorable; Tiberius was becoming more and more wearied of his many affairs, of his many struggles, of his countless responsibilities; more and more disgusted with Rome, with its society, with the too frequent contact with the men whom it was his fate to govern.  He was in the earlier stages of that settled melancholy which grew deeper and deeper in the last ten years of his life, and which had grown upon him as the result of long antagonisms, of great bitterness, and of continual terrors and suspicions; and if it is true that Tiberius was addicted to the vice of heavy drinking, as we hear from ancient writers, the abuse of wine may also have had its part in producing it.  The tyrant, as historians have been pleased to call him, did actually seem to weaken in the fight for those ideals in which he had so long and so ardently believed.  He tried to please the people by advocating no measures that might seem harsh or excessive to them.  He even resisted, in the year 22 A.D., the pressure that his own party—­his own puritan party—­brought to bear upon him to apply with the utmost severity and discipline the laws against the fast increasing luxury of the men and women of his day.  His reply to such pressure was a letter to the senate in which he deplored, among other things, the passion that so many women were showing for jewels and precious stones imported from distant countries.  He maintained that it was the fault of such women that so much gold left the country and pointed out how much more wisely the money could be spent in fortifying the boundaries of the empire.