ud his exit, bade Livia remember him, and so died in his
seventy-seventh year, having ruled fifty-eight years--ten as a triumvir,
forty-eight alone.

CHAPTER XXXI.

TIBERIUS AND CALIGULA.

A.D. 14--41.

No difficulty was made about giving all the powers Augustus had held to
his stepson, Tiberius Claudius Nero, who had also a right to the names
of Julius Caesar Augustus, and was in his own time generally called
Caesar. The Senate had grown too helpless to think for themselves, and
all the choice they ever made of the consuls was that the Emperor gave
out four names, among which they chose two.

Tiberius had been a grave, morose man ever since he was deprived of the
wife he loved, and had lost his brother; and he greatly despised the
mean, cringing ways round him, and kept to himself; but his nephew,
called Germanicus, after his father, was the person whom every one
loved and trusted. He had married Agrippina, Julia's daughter, who was
also a very good and noble person; and when he was sent against the
Germans, she went with him, and her little boys ran about among the
soldiers, and were petted by them. One of them, Caius, was called by the
soldiers Caligula, or the Little Shoe, because he wore a caliga or shoe
like theirs; and he never lost the nickname.

Germanicus earned his surname over again by driving Arminius back; but
he was more enterprising than would have been approved by Augustus, who
thought it wiser to guard what he had than to make wider conquests; and
Tiberius was not only one of the same mind, but was jealous of the great
love that all the army were showing for his nephew, and this distrust
was increased when the soldiers in the East begged for Germanicus to
lead them against the Parthians. He set out, visiting all the famous
places in Greece by the way, and going to see the wonders of Egypt, but
while in Syria he fell ill of a wasting sickness and died, so that many
suspected the spy, Cnaeus Piso, whom Tiberius had sent with him, of
having poisoned him. When his wife Agrippina came home, bringing his
corpse to be burnt and his ashes placed in the burying-place of the
Caesars, there was universal love and pity for her. Piso seized on all
the offices that Germanicus had held, but was called back to Rome, and
was just going to be put upon his trial when he cut his own throat.

[Illustration: RUINS OF THE PALACES OF TIBERIUS.]

All this tended to make Tiberius more gloomy and distrustful, an