suite which accompanied the Emperor contained professional teachers. For the sinister interpretation put upon the arrangement we have only to recall the ineffable prurience of the Italian imagination in ancient times. There are works of art, there are fragments of literature, there are household ornaments dating from this period, and earlier periods and later periods, which are simply indescribable in modern language. The mystery of the Emperor’s seclusion was in itself enough to set the foul tongues wagging and to stimulate the impure inventiveness of the brothel-keepers in the capital; and there were men of rank, and possibly women, only too glad to note down in their diaries evidence collected from the mouths of slaves and other dependents. Similarly with the stories of cruelty. The disturbed condition of political life after the fall of Sejanus created an atmosphere of terror. Tiberius had always been dreaded, and the sensation-mongers could find ready credence for tales of atrocities, for which there was no such obvious contradiction as would have existed had Tiberius been spending his days in the full sight of his countrymen. These tales were believed because everybody wished to believe them, and because there was no evidence to the contrary. Because nothing was seen, anything was imagined. Similarly in the sensational narrative of judicial murders and vexatious prosecutions with which Tacitus adorns his account of the last seven years of Tiberius, the record is so imperfect, the animus is so clear, that we may excusably suspend our judgment. In none of these cases are we given the full evidence against the prisoner; in all everything is told us that can be urged against the judge. It was further the practice of the historians of the time to attribute to Tiberius himself acts which were done by his agents even when he had certainly not ordered the act in question. Suetonius, for instance, states that Tiberius knocked out the eye of the obstreperous Agrippina--he has the grace to add “by the agency of a centurion,” but the story is told in such a way that the odium rests upon the Emperor, and not upon the participants in an undignified scuffle. Similarly there is a ghastly tale of the death of Drusus, the son of Agrippina, by starvation, a process which is said to have lasted for two or three years, during which every word uttered by the prisoner, every groan, was faithfully reported to Tiberius; it is even represented that the miserable man in the extremity of his anguish devoured his cushions. That an official report was forwarded to Tiberius at regular intervals of the conduct of this prisoner of State is what we should naturally expect, nor is it impossible that an overzealous gaoler abounded in details, nor again is it impossible that Agrippina the younger, the sister of the prisoner, left an exceedingly harrowing, though improbable, story in her memoirs.