The qualities which were to render Septimius acceptable to Tiberius are worth notice; he would be in sympathy with a man whose standard of reading, or--for the phrase is ambiguous--choice of pursuit was dignified, he would be staunch, he would be good. Good is the epithet which Horace applies to Tiberius himself in writing to Julius Florus--“Florus faithful friend to the brilliant and good Nero”; he uses the same epithet in the Odes in speaking of a former mistress--“I am not what I was under the reign of good Cinara.” Without pressing the sense of the word too closely, it can hardly have been applied to an ungenial man, such as Tiberius is represented to have been, and may have afterwards become. The future Emperor had a weary road to travel before he became, if he ever did become, what the elder Pliny says that he was, “a most dismal man.” Thus at the outset of his administrative career we find Tiberius in excellent company; it is pleasant to think that he may on some occasion have made an expedition to Tibur or the Sabine Farm, like Torquatus or Mæcenas, and spent an evening with the genial poet, drinking old wine laid down in the consulship of Manlius, watching the wood fire crackling on the hearth, enjoying the jokes of the pert slaves, or perhaps listening while his host sang to his own accompaniment words which the world has not yet forgotten. We may be sure that there were rejoicings when the “company” returned from Asia Minor, that the kid was duly sacrificed, and that if Tiberius himself was not present, Florus and Celsus, and let us hope Munatius told the story of their adventures to the kindly ears of their middle-aged friend. VI The Family of Augustus The principle of the transmission of the chief power by heredity was never recognized as a fundamental part of the constitution of the Roman Empire, though the natural tendency is to allow a son to take his father’s place, and the necessities of ancestor worship made the succession of a real son or an adopted son agreeable to Roman feeling. Neither Cæsar nor Augustus ever had legitimate sons; Tiberius had a son, but he died before his father; Caligula was childless; the ambition of an unscrupulous woman deprived the son of Claudius of the succession and his life; Nero was childless, and in him the Cæsarean strain ended. Circumstances were adverse to the hereditary principle. Short dynasties, such as those of the Flavians, the Antonines, and the Constantines, appear from time to time, but the ordinary method of peaceful succession was the nomination and adoption of a successor or successors by the reigning Emperor.