[8] Flaccus held his prefectship for six years and for the first five of these while Tiberius Caesar was alive maintained peace and held command with such activity and vigour that he excelled all his predecessors.
[9] But in the last year when Tiberius was dead and Gaius had been appointed Emperor he began to let everything slip from his hands. This may have been due to his profound grief at the death of Tiberius. For how greatly he mourned the loss of one whom he looked on as his closest friend was shown by his constant depression and the stream of tears which poured ceaselessly from him as from a fountain. Or it may have been the ill-will he bore to his successor, since he had been a devoted partisan of the actual rather than the adopted children. Or again as he had been one of those who had attacked Gaius’s mother when she lay under the charges for which she was put to death, his fear of being held guilty on this count caused him to neglect his duties.
[10] And for a time he held out and did not entirely lose his grasp of affairs, but when he heard that the grandson of Tiberius, who shared the sovereignty, had been killed by Gaius’s orders, this misfortune was so terrible a blow that he threw himself down and lay speechless, and for a considerable time before this his thinking powers had become feeble and paralysed.
[11] For while the youth lived, his hopes of preserving his own safety were still alight, but with his death it seemed that his personal hopes had died also, even though some little waft of possible assistance still reached him in his friendship with Macro, who originally was all-powerful with Gaius, said to have contributed more than anyone to his gaining the principate and still more to his preservation.
[12] For Tiberius had been often minded to get Gaius out of the way as a person ill-disposed and devoid of natural gifts for rulership, and also because he was concerned for his grandson, who he feared might at his death be got rid of as an encumbrance. But Macro often tried to eliminate his suspicions and would praise Gaius as straight-forward and free from vice and liberal and particularly devoted to his cousin, so much so that he would willingly relinquish the principate to his sole charge, or, at any rate, the premier place.
[13] Deceived by these representations Tiberius unwittingly left behind him an implacable enemy to himself, his grandson, his family, Macro the intercessor and all mankind.
[14] For when Macro saw him straying from the regular way and letting his impulses range unbridled anywhither and in any way he would admonish and exhort him, thinking that he was the same Gaius who while Tiberius still lived was reasonable and docile. But, alas, poor wretch, for his excessive goodwill he paid the extreme penalty, being slain with his whole house, wife and children as a burden, a superfluity and a nuisance.
[15] For whenever Gaius caught sight of him at a distance he would talk in this strain to his companions, “Let us not smile, let us look downcast, for here comes the monitor, the stickler for straight speaking, who has begun to take charge as tutor of a grown man and an emperor, at this very time which has dismissed and set aside those who tutored him from his earliest years.”