and the senate was eager perpetually to condemn any one he might recommend for condemnation.  When Tiberius found him out, they lost their heads entirely, and simply tumbled over themselves in their anxiety to accuse, condemn, and execute each other.  Everyone was being informed against as having been a friend of Sejanus, and therefore an enemy of their dear Princeps; who was away at Capri attending to his duty; and whose ears, now Sejanus was gone, they might hope to reach with flatteries.  You supped with your friend overnight; did your best to diddle him into saying something over the wine-cups;—­then rose betimes in the morning to accuse him of saying it:  only too often to find that he, (traitorly wretch!) had risen half an hour earlier and accused you; so you missed your breakfast for nothing; and dined (we may hope) in a better world.  Thus during the last years of the reign there was a Terror in Rome:  in the senate’s sphere of influence; the senatorial class the sufferers and inflictors of the suffering.  Meanwhile Tiberius in his retirement was still at his duty; his hold on his provinces never relaxed.  When the condemned appealed to him, the records show that in nearly every case their sentences were commuted.  Tiberius’ enemies were punishing themselves; but the odium of it has been fastened on Tiberius.  He might have interfered, you say?—­What! with Karma?  I doubt.

His sane, balanced, moderate character comes out in his own words again and again:  he was a wonderful anomaly in that age.  Rome was filled with slanders against him; and the fulsome senate implored him to punish the slanderers.  “We have not much time to spare,” Tiberius answered; “we need not involve ourselves in this additional business.”  “If any man speaks ill of me, I shall take care so to behave as to be able to give a good accound of my words and acts, and so confound him.  If he speaks ill of me after that, it will be time enough for me to think about hating him.”  Permission was asked to raise a temple to him in Spain; he refused to grant it, saying that if every emperor was to be worshiped, the worship of Augustus would lose its meaning.  “For myself, a mere mortal, it is enough for me if I do my duties as a mortal; I am content if posterity recognises that...  This is the only temple I desire to have raised in my honor,—­and this only in men’s hearts.”—­the senate, in a spasm of flattery, offered to swear in advance to all his acts.  He forbade it, saying in effect that he was doing and proposed to do his best; but all things human were liable to change, and he would not have them endorsing the future acts of one who by the mere failure of his faculties might do wrong.