en age and weakness had driven him to
seek a summer retreat on the Campanian shore. A happy omen, the revival
of a withered ilex at his landing, as well as the temperate air of the
place itself so charmed the Emperor that he forced Naples to accept
Ischia in exchange for it, and chose it as his favourite refuge from the
excessive heat. Suetonius gives a pleasant gossiping picture of the old
man's life in his short holidays there, his delight in idly listening
to the prattle of his Moorish and Syrian slave-boys as they played
knuckle-bones on the beach, his enjoyment of the cool breeze which swept
through his villa even in summer or of the cool plash of water from the
fountain in the peristyle, his curiosity about the big fossil bones dug
up in the island which he sent to Rome to be placed in the galleries of
his house on the Palatine, his fun in quizzing the pedants who followed
him by Greek verses of his own making. But in the midst of his idleness
the indefatigable energy which marked the man was seen in the buildings
with which Suetonius tells us he furnished the island, and the progress
of which after his death may possibly have been the inducement which
drew his successor to its shores.

It is with the name of the second Caesar rather than of the first that
Capri is destined to be associated. While the jests and Greek verses of
Augustus are forgotten the terrible invective of Tacitus and the sarcasm
of Juvenal recall the cruelties and the terrors of Tiberius. His
retirement to Capri, although as we have seen in form but a carrying out
of the purpose of Augustus, marks a distinct stage in the developement
of the Empire. For ten years not Rome, but an obscure island off the
Campanian coast became the centre of the government of the world. The
spell of the Eternal City was suddenly broken, and it was never
thoroughly restored. If Milan, Ravenna, Nicomedia, Constantinople,
became afterwards her rivals or supplanters as the seat of empire, it
was because Capri had led the way. For the first time too, as Dean
Merivale has pointed out, the world was made to see in its bare
nakedness the fact that it had a single master. All the disguises which
Augustus had flung around his personal rule were cast aside; Senate,
Consuls, the Roman people itself, were left contemptuously behind. A
single senator, a few knights, a little group of Greek scholars, were
all that accompanied Tiberius to Capri. The figure of the Emperor stood
out