If, however, the violent disputes of parties no longer raged in the Senate; if blows were no longer exchanged in the Forum when the election of the magistrates or the discussion of the laws was toward; if the threat of civil war no longer hovered continually over the heads of all, concord was not, for all that, re-established in the ranks of the aristocracy which surrounded Cæsar’s family and which ought to have helped that family to govern the immense Empire. Men’s feelings were as much divided as ever, though for different motives. Tiberius, the second _princeps_ in three years chosen by the Senate as successor of Augustus, was hated by one section of the Roman aristocracy, which judged him too old-fashioned—too closely bound to the traditions of the old nobility and of his family, the Claudii; too stern, hard, and rigid; too much out of sympathy with the new customs and new refinements that were beginning to flow from Egypt into Italy; too close-fisted and too keen a professor of a scrupulous and strict financial policy; worst of all, too cautious in his foreign policy. An old warrior, who had passed the best years of his life fighting on the Rhine and the Danube against the barbarians, a consummate diplomat, head and shoulders above all his contemporaries in matters of war and diplomacy, Tiberius had convinced himself that Rome had not strength enough to extend her empire beyond the Rhine and the Danube, and that, therefore, she ought to rest content with the empire which she had already won, which was, after all, vast enough for a tiny aristocracy like that which was seated at Rome. The malcontents, however,—and there were many of these, especially among the younger generation,—not only did not recognise Tiberius’s wisdom, but imputed this sagacious prudence of his to inexperience, to fear, or to envy of the young and brilliant Germanicus. The son of Drusus, the brother whom Tiberius had so much loved, the adopted son of Tiberius, who had been enjoined by Augustus to adopt him, intelligent, brilliant, generous, well-educated, handsome, affable, inclined to be light-headed and casual like most youths who are fortune’s favourites, Germanicus was the idol of all the enemies of Tiberius. He was, and he was conscious of being, their idol, and, without assuming too openly an attitude of opposition, he willingly let himself be worshipped and extolled by the faction opposed to his adoptive father, which faction was strong enough to exercise an effective pressure on the Senate and throughout the State. In fact, Germanicus, who after the death of Augustus had been sent by Tiberius to take command of the legions of the Rhine, had dared to follow a policy of his own, differing from that of Tiberius, on the Rhine, crossing the great river on his own initiative, and making a long and hazardous incursion into the territories abandoned by Rome after the defeat of Varus.