A riot in the theatre was the next event of importance. We shall have on a later occasion to discuss the position of the theatres at some length. It is enough to record that on the present occasion opinions were given in the Senate to the effect that the Prætors should be allowed to flog actors. A tribune interposed his veto according to an old constitutional practice, and was roundly abused by Asinius Gallus for doing so. “Tiberius preserved silence, for he conceded to the Senate such phantoms of liberty.” However, the veto of the tribune was allowed, “because the sainted Augustus had once declared that actors were exempt from the rods, and it was a matter of conscience with Tiberius not to infringe his utterances.” The further proceedings in the Senate on this occasion throw a curious light on the manners of the time. It was decreed that Senators should not enter the houses of the pantomimists, that the Equestrians should not attend them when they went out, that they should not give performances except in the theatre, and that the Prætors should have power to punish the extravagance of the spectators with banishment. Then the Spaniards were allowed to build a temple to Augustus at Tarragona, thus setting an example to all the provinces. The people of Tarragona had not hitherto been fortunate in their worship of Augustus; they had set up an altar to him in his lifetime, and soon afterwards announced to him radiantly that a palm had grown from it. “It is easy to see that you do not often sacrifice,” the old man had remarked. Petitions were presented against the tax of one per cent. on auctions. Tiberius declared in an edict that the military chest depended on that source of income, and added that the burden of the army was too great for the State unless the soldiers served for twenty years; thus the reduction to sixteen years demanded by the mutineers was set aside. The two concluding chapters of the first book of the _Annals_ are also remarkable in their unfairness or want of perspicacity; and yet the grievances suggested by them have been alluded to again and again by historians of repute without criticism and as real grievances, for it is the melancholy fate of most students of Tacitus to lose all sense of consistency.