is duty, Tiberius concerned
himself as little as he might.

But the senate's conception of duty-doing was this: flatter the
Caesar in public with all the ingenuity and rhetoric God or the
devil has given you; but for the sake of decency slander him in
private, and so keep your self-respect.--I abased my soul to
Caesar, I? Yes, I know I licked his shoes in the senate house;
but that was merely camouflage. At Agrippina's _at home_ I made
up for it; was it not high-souled I who told that filthy story
about him?--which, (congratulate me!) I invented myself. How
dare you then accuse me of being small-spirited, or one to
reverence any man soever?--So these maggots crawled and tumbled;
untill they brought down their own karma on their heads like the
Assyrian in the poem, or a thousand of bricks. Constitutuionalism
broke down, and tyranny came on awfully in its place; and those
who had not upheld the constitution suffered from the tyranny.
But it was not heroic Tiberius who was the tyrant.

He was unpopular with the crowd, because austere and taciturn;
he would not wear the pomps and tinsels, or swagger it in public
to their taste. He was too reserved; he was not a good mixer:
if you fell on your knees to him, he simply recoiled in disgust.
He would not witness the gladiatorial games, with their sickening
senseless bloodshed; nor the plays at the theatre, with their
improprieties. In these things he was an anomaly in his age, and
felt about them as would any humane gentleman today. So it was
easy for his enemies to work up popular feeling aginst him.

At the funeral of Augustus he had to read the oration. A lump in
his throat prevented him getting through with it, and he handed
the paper to his son Drusus to finish. "Oh!" cried his enemies
then and Tacitus after them, "what dissimulation! what rank
hypocrisy! when in reality he must be overjoyed to be in the
dead man's shoes." When that same Drusus (his dear son and sole
hope) died some years later, he so far controlled his feelings
that none saw a muscle of his face moved by emotion while he read
the oration. "Oh!" cried his enemies then and Tacitus after
them, "what a cold unfeeling monster!" Tiberius, with an
absolute eye for reading men's thoughts, knew well what was being
said on either occasion.

When Augustus died, his one surviving grandson, Agrippa Postumus,
was mad and under restraint in the island of Planasia, near Elba.
A plot was hatched to s