things, an official pedant. The reports of criminal trials, even though they contain serious charges against himself, were carefully preserved in the public Record Office, "which thus became an official repository for every calumny against the emperor which floated on the impure surface of common conversation." There they probably remained unread until there came a time of zealous reaction against the Julian and Claudian Cæsars—the time, that is to say, of Trajan. "We cannot but suspect," continues the same great authority for 'Rome under the Cæsars,' "that this was the storehouse to which Tacitus and Suetonius, or the obscurer writers from whom they drew, resorted for the reputed details of a prince's habits whom it was the pleasure and interest of many parties to blacken to the utmost. The foulest stories current against Tiberius were probably the very charges advanced against him by libellers which he openly contradicted and denounced at the time, and which would have sunk into oblivion with the mass of contemporary slander, but for the restless and suicidal jealousy with which he himself registered and labelled them in the archives of indignant justice."[1]
"Velleius Paterculus, indeed, and Valerius Maximus," writes Dean Merivale, whose delineation of Tiberius is a corrective of that of Tacitus on many points—contemporaries and subjects of that emperor, must be regarded as merely courtly panegyrists: but the adulation of the one, though it jars on ears accustomed to the dignified self-respect of the earlier Romans, is not more high-flown in language and sentiment than
- ↑ Chapter 44.
