1Then followed an equal rejoicing, for unequal reasons, when the death of Tigellinus was obtained. 1Ofonius Tigellinus, of obscure parents, with a foul boyhood and a shameless old age, had gained the prefecture of the watch and of the praetorian guard and other rewards of virtue through his vices, because that was quicker; he practised cruelty next, and then greed, crimes of a grown man, having corrupted Nero to every kind of wickedness and dared some things without his knowledge, and finally becoming his deserter and betrayer: hence there was no one whose punishment they demanded more insistently, with different feelings, both those who hated Nero and those who missed him.
1Under Galba he had been protected by the influence of Titus Vinius, who pleaded that his daughter had been saved by him. 1No doubt he had saved her, not out of clemency, since he had killed so many, but as a refuge for the future, because all the worst men, distrusting the present and dreading a change, prepare private favour against public hatred: hence no concern for innocence, but a trading of impunity. 1The people, all the more hostile now that fresh resentment against Titus Vinius was added to their old hatred of Tigellinus, ran together from the whole city to the Palatine and the forums, and pouring into the circus and theatres, where the licence of the crowd is greatest, clamoured with seditious cries, until Tigellinus, receiving at the waters of Sinuessa the news that his final hour had come, amid debauchery with his concubines and kisses and shameful delays, cut his throat with a razor, and so defiled an infamous life even by a late and dishonourable end.