Hello, and welcome to the history of Rome, episode 59 to the Tiber with Tiberius.

Tiberius had never been particularly happy with his role as Emperor.

From the beginning of his reign, he had attempted to dump as much of the drudgery of supreme

authority as he could, off on other people, first trying to enlist a thoroughly disinterested

senate, then a willing but dead too soon son, before he finally settled on a supposedly

hyper-loyal Praetorian prefect named Lucius Sajanus, who proved to have only his own

interest at heart.

After the fall of Sajanus, though, Tiberius simply stopped looking for a partner to bear

his burdens for him.

That is not to say that he actually began to embrace the dull responsibilities of office,

quite the contrary.

After Sajanus was executed, Tiberius attended to the Empire even less than before.

But it not been for the inertia of the imperial bureaucracy, the Empire likely would have

devolved into another round of chaotic civil wars, the minute ambitious men realized that

there was no one manning the helm anymore.

But the apparatus Augustus had set up turned out to be self-perpetuating enough to survive

six years of utter neglect by his successor.

In his last years, Tiberius was famously obsessed with two things, one, purging Rome with

anything resembling a threat to his power, and two, indulging in his own increasingly inappropriate

fetishes.

We'll deal with the latter in a moment, but as to the former, in the early 30s BC, Tiberius

unleashed a terror on Rome that dwarfed anything perpetuated by Sajanus.

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