s filled with slanders against him; and the fulsome senate
implored him to punish the slanderers. "We have not much time to
spare," Tiberius answered; "we need not involve ourselves in
this additional business." "If any man speaks ill of me, I shall
take care so to behave as to be able to give a good accound of my
words and acts, and so confound him. If he speaks ill of me
after that, it will be time enough for me to think about hating
him." Permission was asked to raise a temple to him in Spain;
he refused to grant it, saying that if every emperor was to be
worshiped, the worship of Augustus would lose its meaning. "For
myself, a mere mortal, it is enough for me if I do my duties as a
mortal; I am content if posterity recognises that... This is the
only temple I desire to have raised in my honor,--and this only
in men's hearts."--the senate, in a spasm of flattery, offered to
swear in advance to all his acts. He forbade it, saying in
effect that he was doing and proposed to do his best; but all
things human were liable to change, and he would not have them
endorsing the future acts of one who by the mere failure of his
faculties might do wrong.

In those sayings, I think, you get the man: perhaps a disciple
only, and never actually a Master; perhaps never absolutely sure
of himself, but only of his capacity and determination to do his
duty day by day: his own duty, and not other men's:--never
setting himself on a level with his Teacher; or thinking himself
able, of his own abilities, to run the world, as Augustus had had
the power and the mission to do,--but as probably no man might
have had the power to do in Tiberius' time;--and by virtue of
that faith, that high concentration on duty, carrying the world
(but not Rome) through in spite of Rome, which had become then a
thing incurable, nothing more than an infection and lamentable scab.

He left it altogether in his last years; its atmosphere and
bitterness were too much for him. Form the quiet at Capri he
continued to rule his provinces until the end; ever hoping that
if he did his duty, someone or some spirit might arise in the
senate to do theirs. Tacitus explains his retirement--as Roman
society had explained it when it happened,--thus: Being then
seventy-two years old, Tiberius, whose life up to that time had
been irreproachable and untouched by gossip, went to Capri to
have freedom and privacy for orgies of personal vice. But why
did he not stay