because he was the living embodiment of those principles; and because Julia, the witty and brilliant, hated him above all things and made him in the salons the butt for her shafts.  Its darling poet was Ovid; whose poetic mission was, in Mr. Stobart’s phrase, “to gild uncleannes with charm.”  Presently Augustus sent him into exile:  whiner over his own hard lot.  But enough of unsavory him:  the clique remained and treasured his doctrine.  When Caius and Lucius died, it failed not to whisper that of course Tiberius had poisoned them; and during the next twenty-five years you could hardly die, in Rome, without the clique’s buzzing a like tale over your corpse.—­A faction that lasted on, handing down its legends, until Suetonius and Tacitus took them up and immortalized them; thus creating the Tiberius of popular belief and “history,” deceiving the world for twenty centuries.

The Augustan system implied no tyranny; not even absolutism:—­it was through no fault of its founder, or of his successor, that the constitutional side of it broke down.  Remember the divine aim behind it all:  to weld the world into one.  So you must have the provinces, the new ones that retaineed their national identity, under Adept rule; there must be no monkeying by incompetents there.  Those provinces were, absolutely all in the hands of Caesar.  But in Rome, and Italy, and all quiet and long-settled parts, the senate was to rule; and Augustus’ effort, and especially Tiberius’ effort, was to make it do so.  But by this time, you may say, there was nothing resembling a human ego left among the senators:  when the Manasaputra incarnated, these fellows had been elsewhere.  They simply could not rule.  Augustus had had constantly to be intervening to pull them out of scrapes; to audit their accounts for them, because they could not do the sums themselves; to send down men into their provinces to put things right whenever they went wrong.  Tiberius was much more loath to do this.  At times one almost suspects him of being at heart a republican, anxious to restore the Republic the first moment it might be practicable.  That would be, when the whole empire was one nation and some few souls to guide things should have appeared.  At any rate (in his latter years) it must have seemed still possible that the Principate should continue:  there was absolutely no one to follow him in it.  So the best thing was to leave as much as possible the senate’s duty to the senate, that responsibility might be aroused in them.  For himself, he gave his whole heart and mind to governing the provinces of Caesar.  He went minutely into finances; and would have his sheep sheared, not flayed.  His eyes and hands were everywhere, to bring about the Brotherhood of Man.  There is, perhaps, evidence in the Christian Evangels:  where we see the Jewish commonalty on excellent good terms with the Roman soldier, and Jesus consorting freindily with Tiberius’ centurions and tax-gatherers; but the Jewish national leaders