In these words, pregnant and terse as ever, Tacitus gives us a key to the true reading of imperial Roman history. “It is easy,” he says, “to discount the self-interest of the historian and to reject his eulogies, but his malicious criticisms are greedily swallowed. For flattery bears the odious stamp of servility, while malignity wears the false disguise of independence.” Thus out of his own mouth the foremost historian of the early Empire gives us the right to read the literary sources in a spirit favourable to the emperors. So when the historians describe Tiberius as a bloodthirsty tyrant who hid himself away in the island of Capri, and there (at the age of seventy!) began to devote himself to disgusting orgies of lust and cruelty, we shall prefer to reject that story as absurd, and to regard Tiberius as a proud and reserved aristocrat who found it impossible to tolerate the mixture of adulation and spite with which he was treated by the other nobles of Rome, and withdrew from the capital in order to escape it. When Gaius (Caligula) is represented as a lunatic, we merely understand that he was unpopular; when we are told that he made his horse a consul, we recognise a satirist’s humorous exaggeration of his neglect of some noble family’s claims to that office; when we read that he set his army to collect oyster shells on the coast of Normandy, we only conclude that his surrender of the projected invasion of Britain was a subject of ridicule in Rome. Claudius is described as a stupid and clumsy pedant, deformed and inarticulate: in reality he seems to have been a scholar with a leaning towards antiquarian and republican traditions. Even in the case of Nero, the savage ferocity with which he is charged is chiefly due to the fact that his hand lay heavy on the senators. He was undoubtedly popular with the commons, and his real offence was to possess more refinement and culture than was considered proper in a Roman noble, to be too fond of Greeks and art and music. Nevertheless it is impossible to write history in whitewash, and the only safe method of dealing with a period like this is to ignore the personalities on the throne of the Cæsars, and to attempt a broad treatment of the general tendency of these times.