Tacitus was interested in proving that till the reigns of Nerva and Trajan there never had been a good Emperor. Augustus was beyond the reach of attack; that reputation could not be damaged by malignant epigrams, but the end of the reign of Tiberius had been involved in a strange catastrophe, whose unquestioned horrors would lend credibility to misrepresentations of the events by which it had been preceded, and when Tacitus wrote, the Senate had just emerged from a similar, or apparently similar, persecution at the hands of Domitian; in fact, the Tiberius of Tacitus was not Tiberius at all, but Domitian. The curse of the reign of Domitian had been attacks upon the lives and property of eminent men, conducted by paid informers. There was some evidence that the system of rewarding informers had first been extensively used in the reign of Tiberius, and Tacitus believed that he could find abundant material for drawing up a strong indictment against the practice of employing informers in the records of the reign of Tiberius. We shall see how far he was justified in his confidence. But it was not enough to damage a system, it was also necessary to annihilate the man; and here too Tacitus had found the instrument which he required; he had access to certain memoirs written by the younger Agrippina, the daughter of Agrippina, the wife of Germanicus. He tells us of a fact which he mentions:--“This is not recorded by any of the historians, but I found it in the memoirs of the daughter of Agrippina, who was the mother of the Emperor Nero, and handed down to posterity her own life and the misfortunes of her family.” There is not much in the life of the mother of Nero and sister of Caligula which would incline us to suspect her memoirs of being a liquid fount of veracity, but there is a great deal which would tempt us to suspect her of a bitter animosity against the memory of Tiberius and all members of the Claudian stock not closely related to herself. It is not proposed to examine in detail every innuendo made by Tacitus in the course of his indictment against Tiberius, though from time to time it will be entertaining to expose glaring instances of misrepresentation or deliberately malicious inference; but one example of the methods employed by Tacitus may be profitably given as an illustration of the way in which he wrote what has passed for sober history.