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.
Tiberius, feigning sickness, sent Sejanus on to Rome with the assurance that he should follow. He declared that in this separation a part of his own body and soul was wrenched away from him: shedding tears he embraced and kissed him, and Sejanus naturally was thereat the more elated.
[-5-] By this time Sejanus was so imposing both in his haughtiness of mind and in his immensity of power that, to make a long matter short, he seemed to be the emperor and Tiberius a kind of island potentate because the latter spent all his days in the island called Capreæ. Then there was rivalry and jostling about the great man's doors from the fear not merely that a person might fail to be observed by his patron but that he might appear among the last: for all the words and gestures, particularly of those in front, were carefully watched. People who hold a prominent position as the result of native worth are not given at all to seeking signs of friendship from others, and in case anything of the sort is seen to be wanting on the part of these others the persons in question are not provoked, inasmuch as they have an innate consciousness that they are not being looked down upon. Any, however, that hold an artificial rank are extremely jealous of all such attentions, feeling them to be necessary to render their position complete. If they fail to obtain them then they are as irritated as if slander were being pronounced against them and as angry as if they were the recipients of positive insult. Consequently the world is more scrupulous in the case of such persons than (one might almost say) in the case of emperors themselves. To the latter it is ascribed as a virtue to pardon any one if an error is committed; but in the self-made persons that course appears to argue an inherent weakness, whereas to attack and to exact vengeance is thought to furnish proof of great power.