“Your teacher or your predecessor, may hold your hand in his, and give you the utmost sympathy the human heart is capable of.  But when the silence and the darkness come, you lose all knowledge of him:  you are alone, and he cannot help you; not because his power is gone, but because you have invoked your great enemy.”

—­Tiberius was alone, and Augustus could not help him; and he went off, apparently quite out of favor, to seven years of voluntary exile in Rhodes, there to don the robe of a philosopher, and study philosophy and “astrology,” as they say.  Let us put it, the Esoteric Wisdom; I think we may.

The truth about Julia could not be kept from Augustus forever.  It came to his ears at last; when his work was by so much nearer completion, and when Tiberius was by so much nearer his illumination.  The Princeps did his duty, thought it made an old man of him:  he banished Julia according to his own law.  Then it was the wronged husband who stepped in and interceded; who wrote pleading letters to his stepfatehr, imploring him to have mercy on the erring woman:  to lighten her punishment; to let her mother, at least, be with her in her exile.  He knew well what tales Julia had been telling her father about him; and how Augustus had seemed to believe them; but “a courageous endurance of personal injustice” is demanded of the disciple; and very surely it was found in him.  Rome heard of his intercession, and sneered at him for his weak-spiritedness; as kindly letter-writers failed not to let him know.

“Look for the flower to bloom in the silence that follows the storm, not till then.”

The flower bloomed in this case during those seven years at Rhodes; then Tiberius was fit to return.  Outer events shaped themseves to fit inner needs and qualifications:  here now at last was the Man who was to succeed Augustus, duly and truly prepared, worthy and well-qualified:  initiated, and ready to be named before the world Heir to the Principate.  Within a few months of each other Caius and Lucius, the hitherto supposed successors designate, died; their brother Agrippa Postumus was already showing signs of incipient madness.  True, there were many of the Julian line still alive and available, were Augustus (as had been thought) bent on making Julian blood the qualification necessary:  there was Germanicus, married to Agrippina; he the son of Drusus and Antonia, Octavia’s daughter; she the daughter of Julia, and so grand-daughter of Augustus himself:  there were these two with their several children.  But all else might wait upon the fact that Tiberius, the real man, was now ready.  The Princeps adopted him, and no one was left to doubt who was to be the successor.  The happiest years in Tiberius’s life began:  he had at last the full, unreserved, and undisguised friendship of his Teacher.  His portarait-busts taken at this period show for the fist and only time a faint smile on his gravely beautiful face.