Silence blanketed the chamber. A few senators quietly got up from their benches to move away from Sejanus. The first sound was a crescendo of muttering, then a full discordant chorus of condemnation from the very mouths which had cheered the prefect an hour earlier.
Thunderstruck, Sejanus flashed about to summon his praetorians. But they had vanished. The entire cohort had been replaced by guards of the night watch, who were now filing into the Senate chamber. Their commander, Graecinius Laco, stood between Sejanus and the nearest exit. A knot of tribunes and lictors was encircling him.
“Sejanus, come here.”
Paralyzed by icy disbelief, he did not respond.
“Sejanus, come here!” the consul Regulus called a second time, now pointing his finger at the accused. “Here! Now!”
“Me? You are calling me?” Dazed, unaccustomed to receiving orders, Sejanus slowly stood up and faced the Senate, while Regulus repeated the final paragraph of Tiberius’s letter, now as a formal bill of indictment. The face of the prefect looked white as a waxen death mask.
When he finished reading, the consul called on a single, reliable senator for an opinion, asking, “Should Sejanus not be imprisoned?” He dared not submit the matter to general debate, since the Sejanian faction in the Senate might recover to defend their man.
“He should be imprisoned,” came the reply.
Regulus then adjourned the Senate, while Laco and the night watch surrounded Sejanus, bound his hands, and then led him out of the Temple of Apollo. The news blazed through downtown Rome so quickly that swarms of people were already converging along the Via Sacra to witness the incredible sight: the second man in the Empire, a halter about his neck, being led like a donkey westward across the length of the Forum to the Tullianum dungeon.
Pilate begged Procula to stop temporarily, while he rose to adjust his nerves. Perspiring profusely, a sickly knot of anxiety churning his stomach, he ordered a flagon of strong wine and then paced back and forth with rippled brow, his hands wrestling with each other. When the wine was brought he gulped a goblet in one draft and refilled it. Finally he sat down in a slump and asked his wife to continue.
The Roman populace hailed the fall of Sejanus with a wild rampage of joy, Procula resumed, toppling his statues and desecrating his memorials. Partisans of Agrippina led the demonstrations, of course, but followers of Sejanus were desperately eager to change sides and now outdid themselves in trying to show that they had always hated the man.
But where were the praetorians? Sejanus, languishing in prison, had one powerful hope: that nine thousand praetorian guardsmen, marching across Rome, would tear open the Tullianum, rescue him, cut down his enemies. But there was no stirring from the Castra Praetoria.
The reaction of the citizenry combined with the inaction of the praetorians now firmed the Senate in its resolve. Reconvening later the same day, it listened to angry fusillades of oratory denouncing Sejanus. Then, just before supper, Consul Regulus called for a vote. There was little need to count the waving thicket of human arms. Regulus announced, “The Senate and the Roman People sentence Lucius Aelius Sejanus to death for high treason!”
Roman law required that nine days elapse between sentence and execution, but Rome was in no mood to wait so long. That very night, a committee of consuls and praetors visited the Tullianum, and gave orders to the executioners. Under the flickering glow of torches, Sejanus was pulled out of his cell and led to the black-walled death chamber.
“No!” he cried. “This is a violation of Roman law! The praetorians!” he roared. “Get the praetorians!” But a rag was stuffed in his mouth and poked down his throat. Then a long strap of leather was wound around his neck, and the free ends were pulled by guards on each side of him. Sejanus tried to struggle free, but his hands were tied behind his back. The pressure around his neck only increased. Now the lack of air was torturing, excruciating, but the strap kept tightening. The man who had begun the day as virtual co-emperor of Rome was strangled to death at its close.
His body was pitched down the Stairs of Mourning, yet it failed to reach the Tiber. The rabble had to play with it first. For three days and nights the corpse was made to preside over mock ceremonials, then abused and dragged by hooks through waterfront streets until mercifully dumped into the Tiber. Or was it? According to another rumor Procula heard, the mob tore Sejanus’s body into pieces so small the executioner could not find one big enough to expose on the Stairs of Mourning.
In the week following the death of Sejanus, Rome rocked in a chaos of disorder and rioting. The rabid, unforgiving riffraff went after the well-known associates of Sejanus and lynched them in what became a general massacre. Meanwhile, the praetorians, furious at being thought less loyal to Tiberius than the night watch, vented their ire in burning and plunder instead of policing the mobs.
The record of the Senate in that crisis was not much better. Obsequious to the point of nausea, senators scrambled to introduce these measures, all of which passed with acclamation:
1. A statue of liberty was to be erected in the Forum.
2. October 18 would henceforth be an annual holiday, to be celebrated by games and spectacles.
3. In the future, no excessive honors would be granted anyone, except the princeps.
4. Henceforth, Tiberius would be known as “Father of his Country,” and his birthday was to be observed by ten horse races and a banquet.
5. Macro and Laco would receive splendid honors for their roles in felling Sejanus.
The Roman people had sampled blood; they now seemed to develop something of a taste for the scarlet beverage. In another stormy session of the Senate, one old patrician observed darkly, “The blood of Sejanus still pulses in his offspring, the kind of blood which conspires against the state!” Concurring in this masterpiece of logic, the conscript fathers, conscience of the state that they were, condemned Sejanus’s children to death. The eldest was executed six days after his father, another later, and finally the turn came for the youngest brother and sister.
Too young to understand what was happening, the little girl was carried off to the dungeon sobbing that she was sorry, crying that she would never again do whatever she had done that was wrong, that she would forever be a good girl if they would just spank her and let her go.
In the murky depths of the Tullianum, the executioners first thought this was rather amusing, but then, just as they were about to put the garrote on her slender neck, someone remembered that never in Rome’s past had capital punishment been inflicted on a virgin. This caused them to hesitate, but, according to the stories Procula had heard, the delay was short-lived. A brute of an executioner jumped the girl, threw her on the moist floor of the dungeon, and raped her then and there to solve the legal problem. Only then were she and her brother strangled to death in the same halter.
At that point in Procula’s report, Pilate shuddered with horror and loathing at that species of the human animal known as Roman man. Despising his own city and countrymen—it was a new experience for Pontius Pilate.
“But it doesn’t make sense,” he protested. “There are too many unanswered questions. Why didn’t the praetorians defend Sejanus? And why did Macro, his own subordinate, lie to him about the tribunician power? Who baited the trap for October 18, and why?”
“Well,” Procula explained, “only young Caligula remained as an obstacle between Sejanus and the throne. Finally it was Antonia who—”