able to give to her elderly protector. Tiberius Nero died in B.C. 33; his eldest son was then only nine years old, but had already been sufficiently well trained to be able to recite the customary oration as chief mourner at his father’s funeral; both he and his brother are said to have been exceptionally well educated. We may imagine the solitary father with his strong love of learning, the victim of so many disappointments, finding some alleviation to his sorrows in bringing up his boys in the strictest traditions of an old Roman house. III Octavian To the student of even the clearest narrative of the events which followed the assassination of Cæsar, the impression conveyed is one of absolute chaos; officials are appointed and removed, decrees passed and rescinded, provinces assigned and redistributed, leaders combine and separate only to combine again; it is difficult to distinguish any guiding principle, any organized force, by which order might be restored. War and spoliation seem to be universal and continuous, and the direction of the march of events to be subject to the caprices of a licentious soldiery, led by rapacious adventurers, who can keep hold of their troops only by extravagant largess and promises of plunder. Licensed brigandage rules the world. And yet this turmoil was immediately succeeded, and in part accompanied by such prosperity as the civilized world had not yet known; trade flourished in spite of piracy, great public improvements were designed and completed, young men went to universities, travellers passed from one end of the Empire to the other. The exact date of the journey which Horace took from Rome to Brundisium in attendance upon Mæcenas is still a subject of dispute among scholars, but it certainly cannot be placed later than the battle of Actium, and is generally assigned to a time before Sextus Pompeius had been driven from Sicily; neither Italy nor the world were at peace, and Italy had recently been the scene of civil war. There is, however, nothing in the description of this journey to suggest a ruined or disordered country; before Horace caught up the suite of his patron he travelled by the ordinary conveyances along the road or the canal to the South; the misadventures of his journey are only such as happen to travellers in a well ordered country in times of the profoundest peace. The ordinary routine of life can have been but little disturbed by the marchings and counter-marchings of armies; and the habits of order must have been too firmly established to be much shaken by the apparent anarchy at the capital.