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18Tiberius, of course, commended them and made a show of thanking them for their good will, but he rejected their offer as being without precedent; for he was not so simple as to give swords to the very men whom he hated and by whom he was hated. 2At any rate, as a result of these very measures he began to grow more suspicious of them (for every act of insincerity that one undertakes for the purpose of flattery is inevitably suspected), and dismissing utterly from his thoughts all their decrees, he bestowed honours both in words and in money upon the Pretorians, in spite of his knowledge that they had been on the side of Sejanus, in order that he might find them more zealous in his service against the senators. 3There was another time, to be sure, that he commended the senators; this was when they voted that the guards’ pay should be given them from the public treasury. Thus, in a most effective manner, he kept deceiving the one group by his words while winning over the others by his deeds. For example, when Junius Gallio proposed that the Pretorians who had finished their term of service should be given the privilege of witnessing the games from the seats of the knights, 4he not only banished him, the specific charge being that he was apparently trying to induce the guards to be loyal to the State rather than to the emperor, but in addition, when he learned that Gallio was setting sail for Lesbos, he deprived him of a safe and comfortable existence there and delivered him up to the custody of the magistrates, as he had once done with Gallus. 5And in order to convince the two parties still more of his attitude toward each of them, he not long afterward asked the senate that Macro and a certain number of military tribunes should escort him into the senate-chamber, saying that this guard would suffice. He had no need of them, of course, for he had no idea of ever entering the city again; but he wished to show them his hatred of them and his good-will toward the soldiers of the guard. 6And the senators themselves acknowledged this situation; in any event, they attached to the decree a clause providing that they should be searched on entering, to make sure that none had a dagger hidden beneath his arm. This resolution was passed in the following year.
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