ruptly vile. "Whoso," Sakya Muni announced--"whoso discovers that
grief comes from affection, will retire into the jungles and there
remain." Tiberius had made the discovery. The jungles he selected were
the gardens by the sea. And in those gardens, gossip represented him
devising new forms of old vice. On the subject every doubt is
permissible, and even otherwise, morality then existed in but one form,
one which the entire nation observed, wholly, absolutely; that form was
patriotism. Chastity was expected of the vestal, but of no one else.
The matrons had certain traditions to maintain, certain appearances to
preserve, but otherwise morality was unimagined and matrimony unpopular.

When matrimony occurred, divorce was its natural consequence.
Incompatibility was sufficient cause. Cicero, who has given it to
history that the best women counted the years not numerically, but by
their different husbands, obtained a divorce on the ground that his
wife did not idolize him.

Divorce was not obligatory. Matrimony was. According to a recent law
whoso at twenty-five was not married, whoso, divorced or widowed, did
not remarry, whoso, though married, was without children, was regarded
as a public enemy and declared incapable of inheriting or of serving
the state. To this law, one of Augustus' stupidities which presently
fell into disuse, only a technical observance was paid. Men married
just enough to gain a position or inherit a legacy; next day they got a
divorce. At the moment of need a child was adopted; the moment passed,
the child was disowned. But if the law had little value, at least it
shows the condition of things. Moreover, if in that condition Tiberius
participated, it was not because he did not differ from other men.

"Ho sempre amato la solitaria vita," Petrarch, referring to himself,
declared, and Tiberius might have said the same thing. He was in love
with solitude; ill with efforts for the unattained; sick with the
ingratitude of man. Presently it was decided that he had lived long
enough. He was suffocated--beneath a mattress at that. Caesar had
dreamed of a universal monarchy of which he should be king; he was
murdered. That dream was also Antony's; he killed himself. Cato had
sought the restoration of the republic, and Brutus the attainment of
virtue; both committed suicide. Under the empire dreamers fared ill.
Tiberius was a dreamer.

In a palace where a curious conception of the love of Atalanta and
Me