In short, this new movement of public opinion explains the opposition exerted from this time on against Tiberius and makes us understand how there arose the conflict in which this mysterious personage was to be entangled for the rest of his life, and to lose, by no fault of his own, so great a part of his reputation.  I hope to prove that the Tiberius of Tacitus and Suetonius is a fantastic personality, the hero of a wretched and improbable romance, invented by party hatred; that Tiberius remained, as a German historian has defined it, an undecipherable enigma, simply because there has never been the will to recognise how much alive the aristocratic republican traditions still were, and what force they still exerted in the State and in the family.

Tiberius was but an authentic Claudius—­that is, a true descendant of one of the oldest, the proudest, the most aristocratic families of the Roman nobility, a man with all the good qualities and all the defects of the old Roman aristocracy, a man who regarded things and men with the eyes of a senator of the times of Scipio Africanus—­a living anachronism, a fossil, if you will, from a by-gone age, in a world that wished to tolerate no more either the vices or the virtues of the old aristocracy.  He thought that the Empire ought to be governed by a limited aristocracy of diplomats and warriors, rigidly authoritative, exclusively Roman, which should know how to check the general corrupting of customs, the current extravagance and dissipation, beginning its task by imposing upon itself an inexorable self-discipline.  Even though he belonged to the generation of Ovid—­to the generation that had not seen the civil wars—­Tiberius, by singular exception, kept aloof from the undisciplined frivolity of his contemporaries.  He desired the severe application of the social laws of the year 18, as of all the traditional norms of aristocratic discipline.  His generation therefore soon found him an enemy, especially after Drusus’s death seemed to leave neither doubt nor choice as to the successor of Augustus.  From this contemporary attitude arises the tacit aversion in the midst of which, after the lapse of so many centuries, we still feel Tiberius living and working, an aversion which steadily grows even while he renders the most signal services to the Empire.

There was between him and his generation irreconcilable discord.  However, it is not likely that this blind and secret hatred alone could have seriously injured Tiberius, whose power and merits were so great, if it had not been considerably helped by incidents of various nature.  The first and most important of these was the discord that had arisen, shortly after the death of Drusus, between Tiberius and his wife Julia, the daughter of Augustus and the widow of Agrippa.