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Rh tences of exile with legal precision, the presence of Cocceius Nerva was necessary. He, in fact, was a kind of "Secretary of the Hanging and Heading Department."

In the imperfect fifth and in the sixth book of the 'Annals' the history of Tiberius is completed. It is little more than the chronicle of suspicions and fears, and consequently increasing cruelty. An emperor, designed by nature for great and salutary ends—some of which in the first nine years of his reign he carried out—gradually sank into a tyrant, who was at once miserable himself, and terrible to at least the higher order of his subjects. Not until after the death of Sejanus did he learn the real story of his son's death. Apicata, the widow of the fallen minister, drew up a written narrative of the poisoning of Drusus, and then, rendered desperate by the loss of her children, destroyed herself. This new revelation of the perfidy of Sejanus—the only man whom Tiberius had ever, to all appearance, really trusted—brought out all the worst qualities in his nature, perhaps maddened him, for there was insanity in the Claudian family, and more than one of his ancestors had displayed the symptoms of a disturbed, as well as a depraved mind. But the mystery which shrouds the character of this emperor will probably never be completely solved; and it would far exceed the limits, as well as be foreign to the purpose of this volume, to discuss the inconsistencies patent in the portrait drawn of him by Tacitus. The difficulty of severing truth from falsehood, rumour from record, trustworthy statements from scandalous memorials of the time, is forcibly expressed in the following words of Niebuhr:—