welfare, he told the senate, "that such honours ought not to be conferred
but upon those who had been proved, and were of more advanced years." By
thus betraying his private feelings towards them, he exposed them to all
sorts of accusations; and after practising many artifices to provoke
(226) them to rail at and abuse him, that he might be furnished with a
pretence to destroy them, he charged them with it in a letter to the
senate; at the same time accusing them, in the bitterest terms, of the
most scandalous vices. Upon their being declared enemies by the senate,
he starved them to death; Nero in the island of Ponza, and Drusus in the
vaults of the Palatium. It is thought by some, that Nero was driven to a
voluntary death by the executioner's shewing him some halters and hooks,
as if he had been sent to him by order of the senate. Drusus, it is
said, was so rabid with hunger, that he attempted to eat the chaff with
which his mattress was stuffed. The relics of both were so scattered,
that it was with difficulty they were collected.

LV. Besides his old friends and intimate acquaintance, he required the
assistance of twenty of the most eminent persons in the city, as
counsellors in the administration of public affairs. Out of all this
number, scarcely two or three escaped the fury of his savage disposition.
All the rest he destroyed upon one pretence or another; and among them
Aelius Sejanus, whose fall was attended with the ruin of many others. He
had advanced this minister to the highest pitch of grandeur, not so much
from any real regard for him, as that by his base and sinister
contrivances he might ruin the children of Germanicus, and thereby secure
the succession to his own grandson by Drusus.

LVI. He treated with no greater leniency the Greeks in his family, even
those with whom he was most pleased. Having asked one Zeno, upon his
using some far-fetched phrases, "What uncouth dialect is that?" he