the greatest statesman in the history of the world. Augustus has never been a popular hero. The pure statesman who has no dashing feats of arms to his credit, and who has left us no records of impassioned eloquence, does not lend himself to idealisation. Augustus had no contemporary biographer, nor even any very great historian ancient or modern. The early Empire is in the gap between the end of Mommsen and the beginning of Gibbon. Dr. Gardthausen has collected all the available material about Augustus but has scarcely succeeded in making him clear or real to us as a man. Tacitus touched him off in a few satirical epigrams as the crafty tyrant who “bribed the army with gifts, the populace with cheap corn, and the world with the blessings of peace, and so grew greater by degrees while he concentrated in his own hands the functions of the senate, the magistrates, and the laws.” For biographical particulars we have to go to Suetonius’s _Lives of the Twelve Cæsars_, a most unsatisfactory source. Suetonius’s pages teem with human interest, but for purposes of history they are provoking and baffling. He is a patient bookworm who compiles systematic little biographies without a glimmer of the biographical sense. As imperial librarian he had access to most valuable sources of information but he had no critical instinct in using them. He simply collected scraps from various sources and grouped them under headings. For a list of virtues he would go to a courtier’s panegyrics and then turn to a seditious pamphlet for a catalogue of vices. His own instinctive preference being for scandal, he has touched nothing which he has not defiled. It is chiefly due to Suetonius that Augustus appears as a selfish hypocrite, Tiberius as a libidinous tyrant, Gaius as a maniac, Claudius as a pedantic clown, and Nero as a monster of wickedness. And yet under these five reigns the Empire was growing steadily in peace and prosperity. The rulers who were omnipotent cannot have been altogether such as they are described. The factious senators who still dreamed of unreal republican glories and still treasured the memories of Cato as a saint and Brutus as a martyr were not, of course, allowed free criticism of their monarchs. They revenged themselves by writing secret libels, many but not all of which logic and common sense can easily disprove. When it came to popular reigns like those of Vespasian or Hadrian the censorship of the press was removed for a time, and then the senatorial Republicans like Tacitus and Juvenal took ample revenge upon the dead. The scurrilous pamphlets were unearthed and exalted into historical documents and so passed down to our historians as history. It is a suspicious and thankless task to attempt the rehabilitation of these emperors. The world is rightly sceptical of the process which it calls “whitewashing.” Moreover the necessary data are wanting. We can only allow our imaginations to suggest how different the story would