Lucanius Latiaris, the man on best terms with Sabinus among the four, invited him to his house and began complaining about Sejanus; he then went on to heap abuse on the emperor, and ultimately Sabinus joined in. Simultaneously the three others hid in the space between the roof and the ceiling so that they could serve as witnesses. The group then filed charges, which resulted in a death sentence and Sabinus’s execution. “In Rome, the anxiety and panic, the reticence of men toward their nearest and dearest, had never been greater,” Tacitus reports. “Meetings and conversations, the ears of friend and stranger were alike avoided; even things mute and inanimate — the very walls and roofs — were eyed with circumspection” (Tac. Ann. 4.69.3).

At the start it was often men newly raised to the rank of senator who chose this method of advancing their own careers, while their victims tended to be members of old aristocratic families whose ancestry made them potential rivals of the emperor. The crucial factor, however, was that the whole Senate heard the trials and had no choice but to condemn its own members if the emperor did not intervene. The trials thus became a process by which the aristocracy was destroying itself. Tiberius had clearly lost the ability to assess the relative importance of each case. Suetonius reports in his Life of Tiberius that the emperor was dominated by a dread of conspiracies — and the more trials of this nature took place, the better founded that dread seemed to be.

The increase of flattery, intrigue, denunciation, and fear among the aristocrats — to which Tiberius’s own behavior unwittingly made a decisive contribution — now led the emperor to withdraw entirely from aristocratic society, and even from Rome itself. In the year 26 he moved to Campania, and the following year to the Isle of Capri.