u do?" For years he reigned, popular and
acclaimed, caring the while nothing for popularity and less for pomp.
Sagacious, witty even, believing perhaps in little else than fate and
mathematics, yet maintaining the institutions of the land, striving
resolutely for the best, outwardly impassable and inwardly mobile, he
was a man and his patience had bounds. There were conspirators in the
atrium, there was death in the courtier's smile; and finding his
favorites false, his life threatened, danger at every turn, his
conception of rulership changed. Where moderation had been suddenly
there gleamed the axe.

Tacitus, always dramatic, states that at the time terror devastated the
city. It so happened that under the republic there was a law against
whomso diminished the majesty of the people. The republic was a god,
one that had its temple, its priests, its altars. When the republic
succumbed, its divinity passed to the emperor; he became Jupiter's
peer, and, as such, possessed of a majesty which it was sacrilege to
slight. Consulted on the subject, Tiberius replied that the law must be
observed. Originally instituted in prevention of offences against the
public good, it was found to change into a crime, a word, a gesture or
a look. It was a crime to undress before a statue of Augustus, to
mention his name in the latrinae, to carry a coin with his image into a
lupanar. The punishment was death. Of the property of the accused, a
third went to the informer, the rest to the state. Then abruptly terror
stalked abroad. No one was safe except the obscure, and it was the
obscure that accused. Once an accused accused his accuser; the latter
went mad. There was but one refuge--the tomb. If the accused had time
to kill himself before he was tried, his property was safe from seizure
and his corpse from disgrace. Suicide became endemic in Rome. Never
among the rich were orgies as frenetic as then. There was a breathless
chase after delights, which the summons, "It is time to die," might at
any moment interrupt.

Tiberius meanwhile had gone from Rome. It was then his legend began. He
was represented living at Capri in a collection of twelve villas, each
of which was dedicated to a particular form of lust, and there with the
paintings of Parrhasius for stimulant the satyr lounged. He was then an
old man; his life had been passed in public, his conduct unreproved. If
no one becomes suddenly base, it is rare for a man of seventy to become
ab