So Germanicus was sent to the East—but, by way of compensation for his recall, he was given unusually large powers. When the time came to approve the decree which conferred these powers upon him, the party of his friends in the Senate proposed and carried a motion giving him power overriding that of all the governors of the separate provinces of the whole East; the result being that he was constituted a sort of governor-general or even viceroy. Whether Tiberius was personally in favour of this decree, which placed half the Empire in the absolute power of a young man of little more than thirty years of age, or not, we do not know. The probability is that he was not, and that on this occasion also Tiberius was the victim of the intrigues and cabals of the party which favoured his nephew and adopted son. It was very difficult for him to oppose laws which heaped honours on the public darling, Germanicus, because the public imputed his opposition to base motives, such as jealousy, envy, or the fear of opposition. What is certain, at any rate, is that, after this decree, Tiberius suddenly changed the governor in Syria, the most important province in the East, the choice of whose governors rested with him. He replaced the mediocre person who then occupied the post by a first-rate man, Cneius Piso, a descendant of one of the most noble Roman families, of a family which had distinguished itself in the civil wars by its aversion to the Cæsarian party; of a family, in short, which was aristocratic, traditionalist, and conservative to the core. Cneius Piso himself was a determined, conservative, and energetic man, a firm partisan of the old policy with which Rome had kept in subjection and governed so many nations for hundreds of years. Tiberius’s idea is quite clear to anyone who examines it impartially. He did not wish to leave the East at the mercy of Germanicus, who was intelligent and good, but still young, inexperienced, and not always deliberate, and who was easily influenced by light-headed, irresponsible, and often vicious and corrupt flatterers. He wished to place, at Germanicus’s elbow in the East, a serious, mature, energetic, and cautious man; a man who could, so to speak, counterbalance him, retrieve his more serious mistakes, keep an eye on everything he did or said, and in every case warn him in time of the more grave eventualities. Can we label such a device a crime? Or the sinister expression of a morbid jealousy, as Tacitus would have us do? Was it not rather the wise precaution of a cautious statesman, who did not wish to rob an intelligent youth of the opportunities of distinguishing himself and of becoming proficient in the government of a world which would, perhaps, one day devolve upon him, though Tiberius was at the same time anxious that the other’s inexperience should not involve too much danger to the Empire and to himself? But the wisest precautions are on occasions the seed of disasters of the first magnitude.