friends never inquired into the authority of a story derogatory to the Emperors, and the one Emperor, who was never spared was Tiberius; it is no exaggeration to say that the madness of Caligula, and the monstrous freaks of Nero are dealt with tenderly by the writers of the silver age, if we compare the accounts of these with the deliberate malignity which attends on every word and action of Tiberius; and yet common sense tells us that only a very able man could have succeeded Augustus without breaking up his work. At the death of Augustus it was still possible that there would be no second Emperor; at the death of Tiberius the Roman Emperor had become an institution, the pivot upon which the whole machinery of civilized existence turned throughout the world. Hence the peculiar bitterness against Tiberius; the Curia felt that in his reign their last chance had gone, and more than this, that he had been in some sense a traitor to his own caste. Neither the Julian nor the Octavian families had been among the foremost houses of Rome, till the genius of the first Cæsar raised them from their comparative obscurity; but many of the most important events in the history of Rome, no less than her buildings, her roads, her aqueducts, and many of her public monuments, were associated with the Claudian stock, and the Livian, with which it was inter-married, was only less distinguished. Augustus had been tolerated, for his services to the State could not be disregarded, but some day Augustus would die; he did die; his power fell into the hands of the most prominent representative of the old Roman nobility; the opportunity for a restoration of the narrow oligarchy of the Republic came, and it passed away for ever. Two years after the death of Tiberius his lunatic successor was stabbed by a soldier whom he had insulted; the State was left a few days without a head, and the Curia was so inanimate that it could neither restore its own rule, nor provide a new Emperor; it had to accept apparently at the dictation of the soldiers in the Prætorian barracks a man of letters who had hitherto been the laughing stock of the Imperial family.