diligent, nay laborious, in public business—indeed, sometimes too much so, since he would often interfere with matters which it would have been wiser to leave in the hands of the proper and less distinguished officials. By his activity he often incurred blame; and by his awkward manners and want of tact, ridicule also. Naturally a good-humoured man, he was frequently led into cruelty by bad advisers, and these advisers were his freedmen or the empresses.
The reign of Claudius has indeed often, and not improperly, been called "the reign of the Freedmen;" and as their ascendancy pervaded the times both of this Cæsar and his immediate successor, it may be well to give a slight sketch of them here.
That such a worshipper of times past, so stanch an aristocrat as Tacitus, dipped his pen in gall when delineating this order of men, is not to be wondered at. His dislike of these upstarts, as he accounted them, was, however, an echo of an old republican sentiment. Sulla's freedmen were, nearly as much as his proscriptions, the cause of the profound hatred with which the great Dictator was regarded by all except the highest aristocrats of Rome. The freedmen of Pompeius injured, by their pride and ostentation, the popularity of that general favorite of both senate and people. Yet without attempting to palliate the vices of a Polybius, a Pallas, or a Narcissus, it should be borne in mind that in a State which can scarecly be said to have possessed a middle class at the period treated of in the 'Annals'—the balancing influence of the knights as an intermediate power between the senate and the people was a thing of the past—the employment of freedmen in State affairs was almost a necessity of the time. The
