But now stepping forward suddenly from the shadows to which she had retired, a lady appeared, threw herself between the two contestants, and changed the fate of the combat.  It was Antonia, the daughter of the famous triumvir, the revered widow of Drusus.

After the death of Livia, Antonia was the most respected personage of the imperial family in Rome.  She still watched, withdrawn but alert, over the destiny of the house now virtually destroyed by death, dissensions, the cruelty of the laws, and the relentless anger of the aristocracy.  It was she who scented out the plot, and quickly and courageously she informed Tiberius.  The latter, in danger and in Capri, displayed again the energy and sagacity of his best period.  The danger was most threatening, especially because Sejanus was the commander of the pretorian guard.  Tiberius beguiled him with friendly letters, dangling in front of him the hope that he had conceded to him the tribunician power.—­that is, that he had made him his colleague,—­while at the same time he secretly took measures to appoint a successor for him.  Suddenly Sejanus learned that he was no longer commander of the guard, and that the emperor had accused him before the senate of conspiracy.  In an instant, under this blow, the fortunes of Sejanus collapsed.  The envy and the latent hatred against the parvenu, the knight who had risen higher than all others, and who had humiliated the senatorial aristocracy with his good fortune, were reawakened, and the senate and public opinion turned fiercely against him.  Sejanus, his family, his friends, his accomplices, and those who seemed to be his accomplices, were put to death after summary trials by the fury of the mob; and in Rome blood flowed in torrents.

Antonia might now have enjoyed the satisfaction of having saved through her foresight not only Tiberius, but the entire family, when suddenly one of the surges of that fierce tempest of ambitions and hatreds tore from her side even her own daughter, Livilla, the widow of Drusus, and cast her as a prey into that sea of blind popular frenzy.  The reader has perhaps not forgotten that eight years before, when Sejanus was hoping to marry Livilla, he had repudiated his first wife, Apicata.  Apicata had not wished to outlive the ruin of her former husband, and she killed herself, but only after having written Tiberius a letter in which she accused Livilla of having poisoned Drusus through connivance with Sejanus, whom she wished to marry.  I confess that this accusation seems to me hardly probable, and I do not believe that the denunciation of Apicata is sufficient ground for admitting it.  Above all, it is well to inquire what proofs Apicata could have had of this crime, and how she could have procured them even if the crime had been committed.  Since the two accomplices would have been obliged to hide their infamous deed from all, there was no one from whom they would have concealed it more carefully than from Apicata.  We must