. It was Antonia, the daughter of
the famous triumvir, the revered widow of Drusus.

After the death of Livia, Antonia was the most respected personage of
the imperial family in Rome. She still watched, withdrawn but alert,
over the destiny of the house now virtually destroyed by death,
dissensions, the cruelty of the laws, and the relentless anger of the
aristocracy. It was she who scented out the plot, and quickly and
courageously she informed Tiberius. The latter, in danger and in
Capri, displayed again the energy and sagacity of his best period. The
danger was most threatening, especially because Sejanus was the
commander of the pretorian guard. Tiberius beguiled him with friendly
letters, dangling in front of him the hope that he had conceded to him
the tribunician power.--that is, that he had made him his
colleague,--while at the same time he secretly took measures to appoint
a successor for him. Suddenly Sejanus learned that he was no longer
commander of the guard, and that the emperor had accused him before the
senate of conspiracy. In an instant, under this blow, the fortunes of
Sejanus collapsed. The envy and the latent hatred against the parvenu,
the knight who had risen higher than all others, and who had humiliated
the senatorial aristocracy with his good fortune, were reawakened, and
the senate and public opinion turned fiercely against him. Sejanus,
his family, his friends, his accomplices, and those who seemed to be
his accomplices, were put to death after summary trials by the fury of
the mob; and in Rome blood flowed in torrents.

Antonia might now have enjoyed the satisfaction of having saved through
her foresight not only Tiberius, but the entire family, when suddenly
one of the surges of that fierce tempest of ambitions and hatreds tore
from her side even her own daughter, Livilla, the widow of Drusus, and
cast her as a prey into that sea of blind popular frenzy. The reader
has perhaps not forgotten that eight years before, when Sejanus was
hoping to marry Livilla, he had repudiated his first wife, Apicata.
Apicata had not wished to outlive the ruin of her former husband, and
she killed herself, but only after having written Tiberius a letter in
which she accused Livilla of having poisoned Drusus through connivance
with Sejanus, whom she wished to marry. I confess that this accusation
seems to me hardly probable, and I do not believe that the denunciation
of Apicata is sufficient ground