Sejanus
Calculating, ambitious, and a self-made man of no real aristocratic pedigree, Sejanus was a frightening man to have around if you were a member of the imperial household. Having slept himself to the center of Roman government through an affair with Tiberius’s son’s wife, Livilla, Sejanus began to seriously entertain aspirations to be emperor. After Drusus’s death in 23 AD, he became Tiberius’s trusted partner, essentially second-in-command of the Empire; my socius laborum (partner in labor) as the emperor referred to him. And when Tiberius left Rome for good in 26 AD to let loose his debaucheries living on Capri, Sejanus essentially took on the responsibility of running the Empire.
We’ll never know what happened in 31 AD. Perhaps the paranoid Tiberius grew suspicious of Sejanus; perhaps Sejanus launched a failed coup against the emperor. Regardless, one day in 31 Tiberius had Sejanus denounced in the senate, imprisoned, and promptly executed. As far as Roman executions went his was fairly standard, being led out of prison and strangled. What happened to his body afterward, however, was anything but. For three days his corpse was left out in public where it was beaten by his political enemies, and probably also, knowing the cruelty of the times, opportunistic passers-by. Only after suffering this ignominious treatment was it thrown into the Tiber where it drifted out of Rome and out of history.
Just as the mob didn’t hold back on Sejanus’s corpse, nor did Tiberius hold back in obliterating his memory. An issue of coins, minted during Sejanus’s consulship in 31, was recalled and defaced, removing his name. Look at the image at the top and you can see that the words L. AELIO SEIANO have been scratched away. In one of his letters, Seneca the Younger, writing around 20 years after Sejanus’s death, mentioned a statue of Sejanus that used to be in the Theatre of Pompeii. His use of tense is telling, and it’s probably safe to assume that Tiberius wasted no time in having it pulled down in 31 AD. We can assume through the lack of statues and portraits of Sejanus that it wasn’t the only one.