The principle of the transmission of the chief power by heredity was never recognized as a fundamental part of the constitution of the Roman Empire, though the natural tendency is to allow a son to take his father’s place, and the necessities of ancestor worship made the succession of a real son or an adopted son agreeable to Roman feeling. Neither Cæsar nor Augustus ever had legitimate sons; Tiberius had a son, but he died before his father; Caligula was childless; the ambition of an unscrupulous woman deprived the son of Claudius of the succession and his life; Nero was childless, and in him the Cæsarean strain ended. Circumstances were adverse to the hereditary principle. Short dynasties, such as those of the Flavians, the Antonines, and the Constantines, appear from time to time, but the ordinary method of peaceful succession was the nomination and adoption of a successor or successors by the reigning Emperor.

For many years Augustus himself avoided the definite establishment of his own position as even a life tenancy. His office of Imperator was renewed every ten years; the Tribunician power was granted to him afresh every year in form, though not in fact; the Censorian office was taken up every five years; he did not become Pontifex Maximus till eighteen years after the battle of Actium; the only office which he held without a break—that of Princeps Senatus—was not considered to be an office at all, the dignity of the first man in the Senate being constitutionally purely of respect. Under these circumstances it would be strange if the historians were correct in assuming that the chief preoccupation of his life was in providing for a successor of his own blood. Tacitus, who is full of the dynastic question, informs us, with his customary inconsistency, that Augustus himself at the end of his life mentioned three men not connected with the Cæsarean race as possible candidates for the succession, which he could hardly have done had he accepted the hereditary principle, seeing that the Cæsarean stock was by no means extinct.

For a short time the vision of hereditary succession probably attracted the imagination of Augustus, and certainly always occupied the attention of members of his family; but the early deaths of two of his grandsons and the insubordination of a third quickly dispelled the attractive vision.

The acquiescence of other Roman families in the Cæsarean rule was bought partly by admission to a share in the administration, partly by the very fact that the dynastic ideal was not forced in such a manner as to preclude all possibility of a change in the form of government, and a reversion to the happy days of the Senatorial oligarchy. Opposition was further disarmed by intermarriages with the houses least likely to submit contentedly to the domination of one family; both stocks of the Claudians, the Antonians, the Domitians, the Æmilians, the Junians, and others were thus united with the Julians in the lifetime of Augustus or his successor. The consular lists for the reign of Augustus recall the names of the noblest Roman families, and though the old city offices had now become titular rather than effective, men still liked sitting in Curule chairs, and taking the lead in the pageantry which survived the reality of power; the process by which administrative functions gradually passed from the old offices to the new hierarchy was a slow one, and an ambitious young man might still think he had embarked on a career when he had been dignified with the lowest of the old magistracies. The new men were employed less in Italy than in the imperial provinces, where indeed it was important that the officials should be attached to the person of the Emperor rather than to the abstraction called the Senate and the people of Rome. Neither Augustus nor Tiberius were afraid to entrust the really effective powers of Prefect of the City of Rome to members of the old aristocracy.

But if Augustus himself was less interested in the dynastic question than the historians represent, the ladies of his family were by no means equally indifferent; their feuds were shared in by their ladies and freedmen, and the apparently peaceful home of the suave and unconscious Augustus was a raging battlefield, in which the weapons of calumny and innuendo were freely hurled, and the external forms of politeness concealed a state of civil war. Wily Greeks and Jews or other Orientals used to palace intrigues found a field for their special talents in the households of Livia or Julia; holding the confidential positions of physicians, preachers, tutors, and astrologers, they transferred to the Palatine the atmosphere of the Courts of the Ptolemies or Herod. Under this subtle influence mere drawing-room conspiracies sometimes took a serious complexion; young men were impelled by their female relatives to dangerous courses, secret information sped from Roman boudoirs to the palaces of Syria and Armenia.

Livia herself was a skilled intriguer, and though Dio puts into her mouth a ponderous curtain lecture on the subject of clemency, addressed to Augustus, her inclinations were more monarchical than those of her husband. The very substantial compliments which passed between her and Herod of Judæa are not likely to have been exceptional in their character, nor is that wily potentate likely to have been the only man of his class who discovered that her fingers touched the springs of government. Though by the letters of the law Roman women were in an almost servile position, though they were liable to be divorced and remarried to suit the convenience of their families, methods were found of evading the law, and divorces which tended to further aggrandisement were not unpopular with their apparent victims. By a variety of legal fictions women could hold separate estates, and were often immensely rich independently of their husbands. The wives of provincial governors were notorious for their rapacity, and took full advantage of the weakness of uxorious husbands.

Livia spinning the toga of Augustus with her maids or weighing out the allowances of the slaves, was a pleasing picture for the contemplation of her husband and the Romans, but the head of the thrifty housekeeper had room for other than domestic details, and her name was whispered with awe by many who could not have appreciated her homely virtues, and had good reason for suspecting her of very different occupations.

Owing to the early marriages of the Romans a family quickly became patriarchal; some of these marriages, it is true, were mere contracts, children being sometimes married to secure dowries or successions, or ratify family alliances, almost before they were out of the nursery. Owing again to divorces and remarriages the various degrees of affinity between the members of a group of families are very difficult to trace; adoption adds complications, which are further increased by the paucity of Roman names, especially as women generally retained the feminine form of their father’s names after marriage, and sisters were often indistinguishable.

Five chief families were united in the household of Augustus: the Julian—of this the heads were the Emperor himself and his sister Octavia; the Claudian, represented by Livia and her two sons, Tiberius and Drusus; the Vipsanian, represented by Agrippa; the Claudian Marcellan by Octavia’s three elder children; the Antonian by her two younger children. The heads between whom all matrimonial transactions were arranged were Augustus, Livia, Octavia, and Agrippa. Of these four Agrippa was to the two ladies the unwelcome but inevitable intruder; Livia was disposed to push the Claudians, Octavia the Julians, whom she represented equally with her brother the Emperor. These four high contracting parties were about the same age, Octavia being somewhat the older of the four. If there was to be a dynasty, and if the succession was to follow the strict line of heredity, Julia, the one child of Augustus, was obviously the great matrimonial prize. Matters in her case were somewhat complicated by the existence of her mother, Scribonia, an affectionate but easy-going lady, who seems to have abstained from active interference in her daughter’s affairs till she accompanied her into exile many years later. There was another heiress in the family of the same age as Julia, namely Vipsania, the daughter of the despised but necessary Agrippa. She was the granddaughter of Pomponius Atticus, the very wealthy banker and friend of Cicero. Agrippa had married her mother when his fortunes were still at a low ebb, and when it was desirable to conciliate the Equestrian Order to the advancement of Octavian and his friends. Agrippa owed his position entirely to his great ability, and his single-hearted unselfish devotion to the fortunes of Augustus. Nobody had ever heard of the Vipsanian family till he rose to eminence, and the Claudian and Julian ladies were contemptuous of its degrading associations. We do not know whether Pomponia died or was put away, but in the year B.C. 25 Julia, being of the age of fourteen, was declared marriageable, and a pleasing atmosphere of matrimonial intrigue filled the house on the Palatine. To consolidate the fortunes of Agrippa—a really formidable rival, if he chose to declare himself—with those of Augustus, the right thing to do was to marry Julia to Agrippa, but Livia wanted her for Tiberius. A compromise was hit upon; Tiberius was left out in the cold, Julia was married to young Marcellus, Octavia’s son, her first cousin, now a lad of eighteen, and in order to associate Agrippa with the Julian blood he was given the lad’s sister Marcella.

That Augustus can have seriously intended Marcellus at this time to be heir to anything but his private fortune is impossible; so long as Agrippa lived there was no other possible successor to the Imperial power, and the story that Agrippa went off to the East to keep out of the way of the favours shown to the young Marcellus is absurd. Agrippa was wanted in the East, and the information that he acquired there led to the subsequent Eastern progress of Augustus and Tiberius four years later. When Augustus was so seriously ill in B.C. 23 as to contemplate the possibility of his death, he sent for Agrippa and gave him his ring, thus making him his successor so far as it was possible to do so; on this we are told that Marcellus showed such bitter disappointment that Agrippa again went to the East, and for the same reason. A few months later Marcellus died, and Virgil’s touching allusion to the event in the sixth Æneid is probably the only authority for the assumption that the wise Augustus proposed to set aside the tried and faithful Agrippa, the actual second person in the Empire, in favour of an untried youth. Such an assumption involves a contradiction of the whole policy of Augustus. Whatever his weaknesses, whatever his failures in prevision, the one thing he dreaded was the recrudescence of the wars of adventurers. Steadily through his reign he worked in the direction of giving permanence to order, and of quietly eliminating all elements likely to endanger order. He can hardly have been so blind as not to see that the reign of Marcellus was only possible by the sufferance of Agrippa, or to ignore the fact that Livia would work for the elevation of her sons after his own death.

The premature death of Marcellus threw all the matrimonial schemes again into the melting-pot. His marriage had been a marriage only in name, and had left no offspring. For two years nothing was done, but when the whole Imperial party moved to the East in B.C. 21 marriage was again in the air. There was a sojourn, accompanied with much festivity, at Samos, where Agrippa met the rest of the family. His marriage with Marcella had proved childless, his union with the Julian stock had failed; Julia herself seems to have shown signs of an inclination for Tiberius, but such a union would have strengthened the Claudians too much, and Tiberius himself was attracted, if by anybody, by the daughter of Agrippa. Augustus took matters into his own hands; he persuaded his sister to allow her daughter to be divorced, and married his own daughter to his faithful friend Agrippa, a man at least twenty years older than herself. The line of succession was to be through the children of Agrippa and grandchildren of Augustus; Livia, and Octavia were left out in the cold. The former consoled herself by interchanging amenities with the husband of Mariamne on the Phœnician coast, and both ladies pleased themselves later on with a double marriage project, which to some extent restored the balance; Tiberius married Vipsania, and his brother Drusus the very beautiful younger Antonia. The dates of these two marriages are not determinable, but as Tiberius was the father of only one child, in B.C. 12, when Agrippa died, his marriage at any rate was probably a late one, when he was about thirty years of age. There is reason for believing that this at least was a love match.

Julia proved to be a fertile mother, she brought five grandchildren to the founders of the Empire and if the succession was to depend on the principle of heredity, it was secured, for both the ruling powers were interested in transmitting the succession in the Julian line, and three of the children were sons.

Augustus was delighted; the philoprogenitive passion broke out in him; he insisted that Julia and her husband should live in his house; he provided instructors for the children; he seldom went out unless accompanied by them, and they rode round his litter when he went into the country. The boys he adopted, buying them of their father by the ancient rude ceremony, and the two elder ones were henceforth known as Caius and Lucius Cæsar. Livia was more than ever in need of such consolations as could be won by intriguing with Oriental potentates. It seemed that the Claudians were definitely relegated to a subordinate position, and the young Cæsars began to pay increased attention to the mythology of the Æneid and the story of their mystic descent from the goddess Venus. A marriage between the son of Drusus Nero, afterwards known as Germanicus, and Agrippina, the daughter of Julia and Agrippa, was the sole bright spot in the dynastic fortune of the Claudians.

Destiny, however, had not exhausted her possibilities. In 12 B.C. Agrippa died. In the following year Octavia died, and Livia was free to carry out her favourite matrimonial project; the widowed Julia was married to Tiberius, who divorced his wife, Vipsania, to make room for her. This was the first tragedy in the life of Tiberius, destined to bring upon him not only terrible immediate sorrows, but a whole train of calamity, which pursued him to the end of his days. We are told of many Roman nobles that they divorced their wives. Tiberius is the only Roman of whom we are told that he bitterly regretted the wife from whom he had been separated.

We do not know by whom this tragedy was brought about, but we do know that, so far as dynastic pretensions were concerned, Tiberius was the last person to be influenced by such a consideration. Whatever ambitions his mother may have formed for her sons, both of them, now men in the prime of life, enjoyed the confidence of Augustus because they had hitherto shown themselves superior to vulgar ambition. Both were by this time experienced generals, for though the command of Tiberius in Armenia may have been nominal rather than real, both he and his brother had conducted a series of campaigns in the difficult regions to the north of the Balkan Peninsula, in the Alpine valleys, and on the frontier of the Rhine. Tiberius had further shown himself a skilled civilian; he had been entrusted not only with the different Republican magistracies, but he had been made chairman of several of those commissions by which the real administrative work was done; he had presided over a very important commission for regulating the corn supply of Rome, and over another for inquiring into the condition of the agricultural slave barracks, whose owners were accused of kidnapping travellers, and offering shelter to freemen who preferred such a life to military service. After the death of Agrippa he was unquestionably the second person in the Empire, for Mæcenas had no hold on the armies, and Tiberius held this position, not as the stepson of Augustus, but as a representative of the oldest and most highly honoured family in Rome, and as the reward of distinguished public services at home and in the field.

Caius, the eldest son of Julia, cannot at this time have been more than nine years old; it would be some years before he could take any effective part in public business. Augustus, always in weak health, had to provide for the contingency of his own death, and it must be borne in mind that, quite apart from the comparatively ignoble ambition of founding a dynasty, a sense of duty would impel Augustus to obviate as far as he could the disturbance of a disputed succession. Augustus prided himself upon his position as a pacificator; his reign was a reign of peace, its wars were frontier wars; to allow the apple of discord to drop into the centre of this realm of peace was to destroy his own work.

But was it necessary that Tiberius should marry the widowed Julia? Was the match capable of being represented to him as a necessity of state, as a duty so imperative as to override all questions of private inclination?

Certainly it was so, though the public grounds were essentially of a private and personal nature.

The two hostile forces in the Imperial House were Livia and Julia, the former the embodiment of the stern virtues of the Roman matron, personified rectitude and humility in her outward demeanour, inwardly unscrupulous and domineering, free from the more amiable but less dignified weaknesses of a woman, incapable of being led away by the love of admiration, icily regular, intemperate only in her pursuit of the greater ambitions, unmoral rather than immoral, she shunned attracting public notice, preferred the enjoyment of power to the demonstration of power, but was none the less keenly jealous of any encroachment on her domain. It is curious how little we hear of her; the poets do not mention her, gossip did not concern itself with her name; it is only from one or two casual references in Josephus, and a few incidents recorded by Tacitus, that we divine the activity of this force behind the throne. Portraits of Livia survive; her high nose is to be seen behind that of Augustus on the coinage; there are busts, and at least one statue. The countenance is that of a very handsome woman and a very dignified woman, but not of a woman who could laugh readily, the mouth looks as if it could smile to order, but not spontaneously. We may surmise that her virtues were of such an obvious type as to constitute a standing provocation to the wicked, that she was one of those women who are more dangerous to sound morality than a bad example, and against whose standards it is impossible not to rebel secretly if not openly; this is especially the case when it is suspected that behind the genuine inclination to correctness in smaller matters lurk the real deadly sins of the soul, hardness, avarice, lust of power. The story that she was blind to the infidelities of Augustus, and even provided the opportunities, may not be true; the infidelities may be, and probably are, as chimerical as the connivance; but even such a myth may be allowed to indicate the type of character.

Pitted against this calm, correct, implacable woman we have the spoiled child Julia, bent upon enjoying herself to the full, adventurous, audacious, both in deed and word. When her father reproved her for riotous living she is said to have replied that, though he might choose to forget that he was Cæsar, she did not propose to forget that she was Cæsar’s daughter, and doubtless the pert sally, accompanied by some laughing gesture, smoothed away the gravity of the outraged Emperor. For a Roman princess at this resplendent time of Rome’s fortunes three lives were open: she might live as Julia’s aunt Octavia lived, or her first cousin the younger Antonia, in comparative retirement, abstaining from intermeddling with affairs of state, the centre of a refined and possibly literary circle, caring for the domestic interests of those whom she loved, or to whom she was bound by duty; or she might live as Livia lived, darkly intriguing behind the scenes, corresponding with “native” princes, plotting and counter-plotting among the Roman families, or again she might fling herself into the riotous amusements of the gilded youth of Rome, the young gentlemen for whom Ovid wrote his treatises on gallantry.

Gambling and betting were as well known diversions in Roman society as in our own; great ladies made their books upon the circus. Cards were not yet invented, but dice were common. Wealthy young provincials, the sons of great but not ennobled capitalists, were as ready then as now to pay for admission to the highest social circles by dealing leniently with fair ladies whose affairs were involved by debts of honour, and some of them lost their heads and hearts over the business. Masquerading in the unlighted Roman streets after respectable people had gone to their early beds was not an infrequent amusement, and even ladies anticipated at Rome the licence of the Mohawk and Tityre Tu of Queen Anne’s reign in London. Antony and Cleopatra amused themselves thus at Alexandria, to the terror and annoyance of respectable middle class men; the joke of thus playing pranks upon inoffensive persons of humble rank under the protection of a slight disguise is not obvious, but it has at all times presented attractions for a certain order of mind. As for Julia, we are told that her revels were conducted even on the sacred Rostra, the public platform of the government of the world. Her cynical defence of her immoralities is said to have been even more outrageous than her conduct. But for all this Julia did not forget that she was Cæsar’s daughter, and was determined not to submit more than was inevitable to the domination of the woman who was not her mother, but was Cæsar’s wife.

At the death of Agrippa, Julia, though already the mother of four children, and shortly to become the mother of a fifth, was only twenty-seven years of age. During the time of her married life she and Tiberius had been much absent from Rome; they had probably met very little since they were brought up together as children in the house of Augustus. Agrippa may have been an indulgent husband, willing to condone the more innocent levities of his young wife; or Tiberius, remembering his agreeable playfellow, now titularly his mother-in-law, may have chosen to disregard the scandalous whispers which reached his ears from time to time.

On her husband’s death Julia found herself in an awkward position; it is true that her father was her friend, but her father’s wife was her enemy, an enemy whose mysterious influence she had good reason to dread, and whose ambition was menaced by the existence of Julia’s own children, already the darlings of their grandfather. Again it is not improbable that she cherished a purely feminine grudge against Vipsania, who had carried off her handsome playfellow, and was additionally piqued by the happiness which Tiberius had found in his marriage. The personal beauty of Tiberius was remarkable; his accomplishments no less so. He was unusually tall, broad shouldered, well shaped, and well proportioned from head to foot, of great physical strength; he belonged to the fair ruddy type of Italian, and carried a profusion of golden hair, which grew low down on the back of his neck, a family peculiarity, his eyes were exceptionally large, and he was credited with the power of seeing in the dark when first awakened; as he habitually carried his head in a bent position, it is possible that he suffered from some visual defect; he was naturally silent, and a slow talker; he had the reputation of being deeply learned, and indeed versed in occult mysteries, such a man as would attract the curiosity of a woman, and challenge her love of conquest by his intellectual, no less than by his physical, qualities. The few existing portraits of Tiberius fully bear out the descriptions given by Paterculus and Suetonius. The so-called bust of Tiberius in the British Museum is not a portrait of him, and was simply so named because it happened to have been found at Capri.

Personal inclination, no less than policy, would have suggested to Julia that here was the natural protector of herself and children, and there was the additional inducement of delivering a checkmate to Livia by falling in with what had been her favourite scheme. With Tiberius as the stepfather and guardian of the children of Agrippa, there was nothing to be feared from the death of Augustus; Livia’s own son would be in a position to defeat any machinations against the heirs of the Julian race, and it was well known that whatever obligations Tiberius took upon himself, Tiberius would honourably fulfil.

The arguments for the divorce and remarriage were, from the Roman point of view, strong; it was not a question of personal convenience or of advancing personal interests, the object was to maintain the peace of the Roman world. Had Tiberius taken the advice of Mæcenas, it would probably have been to the following effect:—“It is true that you are to be trusted, that no pledge is needed from you to ensure the security of the daughter and grandchildren of Augustus, your whole life shows that you have made your stepfather’s interests your own; but you are not the only person concerned. The two boys will be exposed to every temptation as they grow up; their mother is a fascinating lady, but her best friends can hardly claim for her that she is equal to the task of bringing up a family whose responsibilities will be great. If you do not marry her, somebody else will; it would be a serious risk to expose any possible candidate to the temptations of such a position, to introduce a new claimant to the family honours into the family circle. Julia needs a protector, a husband of her own age; she is said to have a strong personal attachment to yourself, and under your guidance it is not likely that she will repeat pardonable indiscretions, to which perhaps she was driven by want of real sympathy with her previous elderly husband. You say that you and your present wife are devoted to one another. Granted; but you are both called upon by a destiny, which you cannot evade, to sacrifice yourselves to the good of the State.” And Horace too would have argued much in the same strain; he would have sympathized more delicately with the feelings of a united couple rudely torn asunder, but with his shrewd common sense he would have shown that there was no alternative but a retirement into private life, a course which would have amounted to abandoning the post of duty.

The person, however, who most strongly influenced Tiberius in his fatal decision was possibly Vipsania herself. From both parents she inherited businesslike qualities, cool common sense. Neither of them is credited with having been sentimental at any period of his or her career, and though Tiberius was devoted to her, it is quite possible that she herself regarded her marriage dispassionately as an excellent business arrangement, and that, while she fulfilled all the duties of a wife with scrupulous observance, she was prepared to be equally careful of the interests and honour of any husband with whom she was provided by the higher powers of the family council. She had abundant precedent for taking such a line, and Asinius Gallus, the aspirant proposed to her, was in every way a desirable match. She may have been really indifferent, and have wounded Tiberius by her cool acquiescence in the new arrangement; or again, on this side too there may have been a great renunciation, and the unhappy woman, partly terrified by obscure menaces from Livia, partly persuaded by the kindly urgency of Augustus, may have affected an indifference which she did not feel, and deliberately wounded the man whom she loved for his own good, as she was led to believe. If Vipsania thus hurt the sensitive Tiberius, and shook his faith in his previous happiness, there was Julia ready to heal the wound; was he not the man whom she had always really loved? Her first and second marriages had been no real marriages: she and Marcellus had been mere children, and as for Agrippa, worthy man though he was, he could not feel with a wife so much younger than himself; he had always preferred the society of men who talked of bridges and aqueducts, or planned campaigns against the Sarmatians, to his wife and children; he had been good according to his lights, but it had been a dull life, and she had been driven to find relief in foolish though innocent dissipations by which her good name had suffered, and which she now sincerely regretted. If Tiberius would but take pity on her forlorn condition, and do his best to love his old playfellow, she for her part could conceive no greater happiness than to be the partner of his joys and sorrows; she loved him, she had always loved him, and the careless indifference of years had not weakened her attachment.

Whatever the arguments and allurements by which Tiberius was induced to take the fatal step, he unquestionably did so. At first he lived happily with Julia; they had one son, who died in infancy; and then his official duties took the husband from his home; he was placed in charge of a harassing campaign against a mobile enemy in difficult country along the south of the Danube and in Dalmatia, while his brother Drusus was similarly engaged in frontier wars along the Rhine.

At this time a serious misfortune fell upon Tiberius; he lost his brother.

Drusus had conducted a foray into the Black Forest region, which had not been altogether successful. On his return he either fell from his horse or caught some serious fever—both stories are given—and was seen to be in such danger that Augustus, who was then at Lyons, at once sent for Tiberius from Dalmatia. Tiberius hastened to his brother’s bedside. The elder Pliny tells us that on this occasion he achieved a record speed, travelling 200 Roman miles within twenty-four hours. He was in time to close his brother’s eyes, but that was all. Augustus decided that Drusus should be buried at Rome, and Tiberius marched the whole way on foot at the head of the funeral procession from Lyons to the capital. As soon as the ceremonies were over, he returned to continue his brother’s work on the eastern bank of the Rhine, and after two years’ absence was recalled. Mæcenas had died in B.C. 8, and Augustus felt the need of a confidential adviser. Tiberius on his return was invested with the tribunician power, an elevation which, in the opinion of his contemporaries, finally marked him out as the successor of Augustus.

The history of the tribunate, in spite of the many references to the office, is not particularly clear. It seems that the first tribunes were originally the official mouthpieces of that part of the population of Rome whom we should now call “Outlanders.” After the “Outlanders,” or plebeians, had become for all practical purposes fused into the general body of Roman citizens, the tribunes ranked practically among the other magistrates; they enjoyed the special prerogative of being sacrosanct, their persons were inviolable, and thus during their term of office they were nominally above the laws, a privilege which, however, did not prevent their assassination. They had the power of introducing legislation, and of vetoing legislation, and it is perhaps this power which was constitutionally most important to the early Emperors. Further, they had powers of summary jurisdiction, and constituted a supreme court of appeal in cases in which the life of a Roman citizen was in danger; when St. Paul “appealed unto Cæsar,” it was to the tribune that he appealed. The office was hallowed by sentiment, and though as Consul and Censor and Commander-in-chief the Emperor might seem to hold in his hands all the reasonable means of making his power effective, unless he were also Tribune, his actions could be vetoed; thus Augustus was more than usually wise in absorbing the sanctity and the functions of the Tribune into his own person, and he could show no greater proof of his confidence in Tiberius than by thus giving him the power of constitutional opposition and investing his person with inviolability; but, to the astonishment of the Roman world, Tiberius had hardly received this mark of confidence before he summarily left Rome and retired to Rhodes.