Ovid's first important work was the _Amores_, which was certainly out by the year 8 B.C. although in a different form from that in which we now have it. To understand what this book really was when it was published, one must remember that it was written, read, and what is more, _admired_, ten years after the promulgation of the _lex de maritandis ordinibus_ and of the _lex de adulteriis_; it should be read with what remains of the text of those laws in hand. We are astonished at the book, full of excitements to frivolity, to dissipation, to pleasure, to those very activities that appeared to the ancients to form the most dangerous part of the "corruption." Extravagances of a libertine poet? The single-handed revolt of a corrupt youth, which cannot be considered a sign of the times? No. If there had not been in the public at large, in the higher classes, in the new generation, a general sympathy with this poetry, subversive of the solemn Julian laws, Ovid would never have been recognised in the houses of the great, petted and admired by high society. The great social laws of Augustus, the publication of which had been celebrated by Horace in the _Carmen Seculare_, wounded too many interests, tormented too many selfishnesses, intercepted too many liberties. His revolutionary elegies had made Ovid famous, because these interests and these selfishnesses finally rebelled with the new generation, which had not seen the civil wars. Other incidents before and after the publication of the _Amores_ also show this reaction against the social laws. Therefore Augustus proposed about this time to abolish the provision of the _lex de maritandis ordinibus_ that excluded celibates from public spectacles; and by his personal intervention sought to put a check upon the scandalous trials for adultery that his law had originated--two acts that were so much admired by a part of the public that statues were erected to him by popular subscription. In short, this new movement of public opinion explains the opposition exerted from this time on against Tiberius and makes us understand how there arose the conflict in which this mysterious personage was to be entangled for the rest of his life, and to lose, by no fault of his own, so great a part of his reputation. I hope to prove that the Tiberius of Tacitus and Suetonius is a fantastic personality, the hero of a wretched and improbable romance, invented by party hatred; that Tiberius remained, as a German historian has defined it, an undecipherable enigma, simply because there has never been the will to recognise how much alive the aristocratic republican traditions still were, and what force they still exerted in the State and in the family.