inconvenience, and sometimes
shortage of food in the city. Claudius went down to Ostia and
looked about him; and ordered a harbor dredged out and built
there on a large scale. The best engineers of the day said it
was impossible to do, and would not pay if done. But the old
fool stuck to his views and made them get to work; and they
found it, though difficult and costly, quite practicable; and
when finished, it solved the food problem triumphantly. This is
by way of example.--Poor old fool! it was said he never forgot a
kindness, or remembered an injury. He came soon, however, to be
managed by various freedmen and rascals and wives; all to the
end that aristocratic Rome should be well punished for its sins.
One day when he was presiding in the law courts, someone cried
out that he was an old fool,--which was very true.--and threw a
large book at him that cut his face badly,--which was very
unkind. And yet, all said, through him and through several fine
and statesmanlike measures he put through, the work of Augustus
and Tiberius in the empire at large was in many ways pushed
forward: he did well by the provinces and the subject races, and
carried on the grand homogenization of the world.

He reigned thirteen years; then came Nero. If one accepts the
traditional view of him, it is not without evidence. His
portraits suggest one ensouled by some horrible elemental; one
with no human ego in him at all. The accounts given of his moods
and actions are quite credible in the light of the modern medical
knowledge as to insanity; you would find men like Tacitus Nero
in most asylums. Neither Tacitus nor Suetonius was in the habit
of taking science as a guide in their transcriptions; they did
not, in dealing with Tiberius for example, suit their facts to
the probabilities, but just set down the worst they had heard
said. What they record of him is unlikely, and does not fit in
with his known actions. But in drawing Nero, on the contrary,
they made a picture that would surprise no alienist. Besides,
Tacitus was born some seventeen years after Tiberius died; but
he was fourteen years old at the death of Nero, and so of an age
to have seen for himself, and remembered. Nero did kill his
mother, who probably tried to influence him for good; and he did
kill Seneca, who certainly did. His reign is a monument to the
rottenness of Rome; his fall, a proof, perhaps, of the soundness
of the provinces. For when _they_ felt t