monarchy easily glides into tyranny, and he accepts the Empire only as a perilous necessity which may be justified by the advent of a good prince. The hereditary succession, which had been grafted on the principate of Augustus, had inflicted on the world a succession of fools or monsters. The only hope lay in elevating the standard of virtue, and in the choice of a worthy successor by the forms of adoption.(147) The one had in his own time given the world a Domitian, and was destined within three generations to give it a Commodus. The other secured to it the peace and order of the age of which Tacitus saw the dawn.(148) The motive of Tacitus was essentially ethical, and his moral standard was in many respects lofty. Yet his standard was sometimes limited by the prejudices of his class. He cherished the old Roman ideal of “virtus” rather than the Stoic gospel of a cosmopolitan brotherhood of man.(149) Like Pliny, he felt little horror at gladiatorial combats,(150) although he may have had a certain contempt for the rage for them. He had probably far less humane feelings than Pliny on the subject of slavery.(151) While he admired many of the rude virtues of the Germans, he prayed Heaven that their tribal blood-feuds might last for ever.(152) He has all the faith of Theognis in the moral value of blood and breeding. He feels a proud satisfaction in recording the virtues of the scion of a noble race, and degeneracy from great traditions moves his indignant pity.(153) He sometimes throws a veil over the degenerates.(154) The great economic revolution which was raising the freedman, the petty trader, the obscure provincial, to the top, he probably regarded with something of Juvenal’s suspicion and dislike. The new man would have needed a fine character, or a great record of service, to commend him to Tacitus.(155) But, with all these defects of hard and narrow prejudice, Tacitus maintains a lofty ideal of character, a severe enthusiasm for the great virtues which are the salt of every society.