The following letter probably belongs to the period after the return of Tiberius, and was written on some occasion when he was starting on a second campaign It is written with occasional quite unnecessary slips into Greek, which have been mangled in places by the transcribers, so as to be unintelligible: “Goodbye, most amiable Tiberius, and farewell to me and mine ... best of generals. Yes, most amiable, and as I hope for happiness, most brave man, and most illustrious general, farewell. The scheme of your summer operations! Well, I, my dear Tiberius, in the midst of many difficulties and considering the slackness of our military friends, do not think I could have managed matters with greater foresight than you have done. The men who were with you, in fact, all admit that the well known line could be applied to you: ‘One man saved the state for us by his wakefulness.’ Whenever anything happens which requires my closer thought, if ever I am very much put out, I swear to you I miss my dear Tiberius, and that verse of Homer’s occurs to me ‘when he follows....’ When I hear and read that you are getting thin under the continuance of your labours, may I be confounded if my body is not all one shudder, and I implore you to spare yourself, lest, if we hear that you are in bad health, your mother and I may expire, and the Roman people be in jeopardy of losing its imperial position. It does not matter a bit whether I myself am ill or well, if you are not well. I implore the gods to preserve you to us, and to give you your health now and always, if they do not utterly hate the Roman people.” There is nothing insincere in the tone of this letter; it is as natural as a letter can be, incoherent in places, but always tender. In fact, whatever misunderstandings arose between Tiberius and Augustus were due to the misconduct of Julia, or the silly plots and counterplots of Livia and the other ladies of the family, who by their domestic jealousies opened the way to the machinations of men of the type of Marcus Lollius. The friendship of the two men passed through the severest possible test, and it survived the test. Augustus may have thought Tiberius too scrupulous in the matter of Julia, and that the second place in the Empire was worth a little conjugal blindness, and even if he did not take that line, there were plenty of men and women ready to suggest it to him. But the sequel proved that Tiberius had been right, and he contrived in the end to assert his independence without being involved in a bitter personal quarrel with Augustus. Nor must too much stress be laid upon such chance utterances as the often quoted “O my Roman people, in what slow jaws you will be chewed!” We do not know the context, and this may very well have been no more than a piece of good-humoured personal banter, suggested by the well-known slowness of speech which was characteristic of Tiberius.