Britain, the Empire of England will be broken up, as the Empire of Rome was broken up; not by any sudden cataclysm, but by the gradual intrusion of the less civilized and less trained components of the Empire upon the central administration. The end of the government of Tiberius upon the Rhine was also the beginning of his retirement; his resumption of public work was almost immediately followed by a fresh outbreak in the Pannonian region, and then came a terrible disaster to the Roman arms in the district of the Rhine. Of the campaigns which followed we fortunately have a fairly clear account given us by an eyewitness, Paterculus. Unfortunately the only work from the pen of Paterculus that has come down to our times, perhaps the only work that he completed, is a short epitome of Roman history from the beginning to A.D. 30, which seems to have been written as an introduction to a work of considerable detail dealing with the campaigns in which the author and the relatives of his friend Marcus Vinicius, to whom the work is dedicated, took part. Paterculus belonged to the class of professional soldiers and administrators whom the Empire called into being, or to whom at least it gave a position which they had not hitherto enjoyed. In his eyes the Empire was good, and its rulers were good; and while he is profuse in his admiration of the heroes of the old Republic, and can pay as high a tribute to Cicero as to any supporter of the Empire, he is no less commendatory of the men who were brought to the front by the new order of things. He does not single out Tiberius as alone worthy of praise; such men as Marcus Lepidus, the son of the triumvir, and others who were in a position to excite the jealousy of a suspicious tyrant, enjoy a full share of his somewhat exuberant laudation. We may admit that Paterculus was uncritical without accusing him of deliberate dishonesty; he was a successful man; he was in the swim; he had no reason for nicely adjusting praise and censure to meet the merits of the men with whom he worked; he was not a frequenter of the Legitimist drawing rooms, but an active capable official, bluff, hearty, with an unfortunate propensity to consider himself a stylist. His grandfather was, as we have seen, an intimate friend and fellow soldier of the father of Tiberius; his father was also a soldier; he himself followed the family profession; he served under Caius Cæsar in Armenia, under Agrippa in Pannonia, under Tiberius both in Germany and Pannonia; he was honoured with civil magistracies at Rome, and eventually became a Senator; his brother was similarly successful. His value to us lies in the fact that he was an eyewitness of the events which he describes, and we may be sure that the few details which he thought worthy of mention in his rapid summary are actual facts. M. Vinicius was Consul in A.D. 30, and the honour enjoyed by his friend prompted Paterculus to write and dedicate this little work. In the following year the events