Under the immediate successors of Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius and Nero, his policy was, on the whole, maintained with good faith and discretion; and at the close of the first century A.D. Vespasian and his two sons, Titus and Domitian, did little more than improve the working of the machinery of his government. More and more, it is true, the constitution became a real monarchy; the part played in it by the Senate of the free State was getting steadily narrowed; but this was all in the interest of efficiency, and, so far as we can see, it was necessary to the internal development of the Empire. The Cæsars of the first century must have the credit of ruling wisely, with the help of their advisers, on the Augustan principles. True, the great literary genius of the age, the historian Tacitus, by drawing brilliant and lurid portraits of some of them, has diverted our attention from their work as agents of a great system; but to tell their story as Tacitus has told it is neither possible nor necessary here. I may pass them over and go on to the second century and the age of the Antonines, which has rightly been judged by historians to be the most brilliant and the happiest in all Roman history. That four men of what seems to us “right judgment in all things” should succeed each other in power at this critical time, is one more example of the wonderful good fortune of Rome. All were men of capacity and education, hard workers and conscientious, and they seem to have communicated their good qualities to their subordinates, for they never wanted for loyal helpers. The Senate, indeed, was now of little avail for actual work, and the greater part of the business had long been done by Cæsar[17] and his own “servants,” freedmen for the most part, often ambitious and unscrupulous Greeks; but in this period, as we shall see directly, the civil service, as we may call it, was placed on a sound and honourable basis. It would seem as if the ideas of duty and discipline were once more to prevail throughout the Roman official world.