Tacitus will have helped them to a decision, I cannot guess: he seems to
me, to deepen the mystery of Tiberius. At a first reading, and upon the
surface, he is hostile to the Emperor; there is no doubt, that he himself
remained hostile, and that he wished his readers to take away a very bad
impression: but, as we become familiar with his pages, as we ponder his
words and compare his utterances, we begin to suspect our previous
judgment; another impression steals upon us, and a second, and a third,
until there grows imperceptibly within us a vision of something different.
Out of these dim and floating visions, a clearer image is gradually
formed, with lineaments and features; and, at length, a new Tiberius is
created within our minds: just as we may have seen a portrait emerge under
the artist's hand, from the intricate and scattered lines upon an easel.
Then it dawns upon us, that, after all, Tacitus was not really an intimate
at Capri; that he never received the secret confidences of Tiberius, nor
attended upon his diversions. And at last it is borne in upon us, as we
read, that, if we put aside rumours and uncertain gossip, whatever
Tiberius does and says is unusually fine: but that Tacitus is not
satisfied with recording words and actions; that he supplies motives to
them, and then passes judgment upon his own assumptions: that the evidence
for the murder of Germanicus, for instance, would hardly be accepted in a
court of law; and that if Piso were there found guilty, the Emperor could
not be touched. At any rate, we find it stated in "The Annals," that
"Tiberius by the temptations of money was incorruptible;" and he refused
the legacies of strangers, or of those who had natural heirs. "He wished
to restore the people to severer manners," like many sovereigns; unlike
the most of them, "in his own household, he observed the ancient
parsimony." Besides the "severa paupertas" of Camillus and Fabricius, he
had something of their primitive integrity; and he declined, with scorn,
to be an accomplice in the proposed assassination of Arminius: "non fraude
neque occultis, sed palam et armatum, Populum Romanum hostes suos