of
the solemn Julian laws, Ovid would never have been recognised in the
houses of the great, petted and admired by high society. The great
social laws of Augustus, the publication of which had been celebrated
by Horace in the _Carmen Seculare_, wounded too many interests,
tormented too many selfishnesses, intercepted too many liberties.

His revolutionary elegies had made Ovid famous, because these
interests and these selfishnesses finally rebelled with the new
generation, which had not seen the civil wars. Other incidents before
and after the publication of the _Amores_ also show this reaction
against the social laws. Therefore Augustus proposed about this time
to abolish the provision of the _lex de maritandis ordinibus_ that
excluded celibates from public spectacles; and by his personal
intervention sought to put a check upon the scandalous trials for
adultery that his law had originated--two acts that were so much
admired by a part of the public that statues were erected to him by
popular subscription.

In short, this new movement of public opinion explains the opposition
exerted from this time on against Tiberius and makes us understand how
there arose the conflict in which this mysterious personage was to be
entangled for the rest of his life, and to lose, by no fault of his
own, so great a part of his reputation. I hope to prove that the
Tiberius of Tacitus and Suetonius is a fantastic personality, the hero
of a wretched and improbable romance, invented by party hatred;
that Tiberius remained, as a German historian has defined it, an
undecipherable enigma, simply because there has never been the will to
recognise how much alive the aristocratic republican traditions
still were, and what force they still exerted in the State and in the
family.

Tiberius was but an authentic Claudius--that is, a true descendant of
one of the oldest, the proudest, the most aristocratic families of the
Roman nobility, a man with all the good qualities and all the defects
of the old Roman aristocracy, a man who regarded things and men with
the eyes of a senator of the times of Scipio Africanus--a living
anachronism, a fossil, if you will, from a by-gone age, in a world
that wished to tolerate no more either the vices or the virtues of the
old aristocracy. He thought that the Empire ought to be governed by a
limited aristocracy of diplomats and warriors, rigidly authoritative,
exclusively Roman, which should know how to check the