, you best of all
generals, in all that you undertake for me and for the Muses."

Two years later Augustus died, and Tiberius became emperor; and
the persecution broke out that was not to end till his death.
Let us get the whole situation firmly in mind. There was that
clique in high society of men who hated the Principate because it
had robbed them of the spoils of power. It gathered first round
Scribonia, because she hated Augustus for divorcing her; then
round Julia, because she was living in open contempt of the
principles her father stood for. Its chief bugbear of all
was Tiberius, because he was the living embodiment of those
principles; and because Julia, the witty and brilliant, hated
him above all things and made him in the salons the butt for her
shafts. Its darling poet was Ovid; whose poetic mission was, in
Mr. Stobart's phrase, "to gild uncleannes with charm." Presently
Augustus sent him into exile: whiner over his own hard lot. But
enough of unsavory him: the clique remained and treasured his
doctrine. When Caius and Lucius died, it failed not to whisper
that of course Tiberius had poisoned them; and during the next
twenty-five years you could hardly die, in Rome, without the
clique's buzzing a like tale over your corpse.--A faction that
lasted on, handing down its legends, until Suetonius and Tacitus
took them up and immortalized them; thus creating the Tiberius
of popular belief and "history," deceiving the world for
twenty centuries.

The Augustan system implied no tyranny; not even absolutism:--it
was through no fault of its founder, or of his successor, that
the constitutional side of it broke down. Remember the divine
aim behind it all: to weld the world into one. So you must
have the provinces, the new ones that retaineed their national
identity, under Adept rule; there must be no monkeying by
incompetents there. Those provinces were, absolutely all in the
hands of Caesar. But in Rome, and Italy, and all quiet and
long-settled parts, the senate was to rule; and Augustus' effort,
and especially Tiberius' effort, was to make it do so. But by
this time, you may say, there was nothing resembling a human ego
left among the senators: when the Manasaputra incarnated, these
fellows had been elsewhere. They simply could not rule.
Augustus had had constantly to be intervening to pull them out of
scrapes; to audit their accounts for them, because they could
not do the sums themselves; to