“Poppæus Sabinus was continued in the governorship of Moesia, Achaia and Macedonia being added to the province. This too was one of the ways of Tiberius, to prolong the periods of office and to keep most of the officials in command of the same armies or at the head of the same jurisdictions to the ends of their lives. Various reasons are given. Some said that through mere distaste for fresh exertion he treated appointments once made as eternal, others that he was envious and wanted few to enjoy power; some think that selections were a matter of serious anxiety to him because he was cunning; he had little regard for eminent virtues, and again he disliked vices; he feared danger to himself from worthy men, public disgrace from bad men. At length he went so far in this kind of dilatoriness that he assigned provinces to some men, whom he did not intend to leave the city.” The frequent change of Governors, Generals, and other officials had been the curse of the Republican Government. Again and again it had been necessary, when serious work was to be done, to lengthen the limited terms of office allowed by the old senatorial constitution; the old arrangements had not been made in the interests of the provincials or the administration of public business, but so that the members of the oligarchy at Rome might share and share alike in the plunder of the conquered countries, and that no single one of them should acquire sufficient money or power to set himself above the laws. When the old arrangements were rigorously carried out, no Roman Governor had more than a transitory glance of the province which he occupied; he himself and the train by which he was attended devoted their energies to making as much as they could in the short time at their disposal; the evil had been pointed out again and again; and as Tacitus has himself told us, the burden even of the reformed senatorial government was such that two impoverished provinces begged to be relieved of it. The policy of Tiberius was the only sound one for the provinces, and the sole objection to it was an objection which he, if he had been a suspicious ruler, might have felt to be a strong one. There was a danger that the men who stayed in their provinces long enough to feel their strength might be tempted to set up an independent government. This danger Tiberius preferred to risk, and that he did so acquits him of the charge conveyed in the insinuation that he was jealous of the enjoyment of power by a number of persons. Eventually, as we shall see later on, he made the Governors of provinces Secretaries of State for the countries which they governed; they did not leave Rome, but were the channels through which the business of the provinces was conducted at Rome. The language which Tacitus here uses is not the language of an experienced official working under Trajan with the records of a century of the Empire behind him, but the language of a reactionary of the reign of Tiberius.