paid his deceased Father: for himself he would not depart from the corpse;
and further than this edict implied, he claimed no share in the public
administration." Yet from the moment Augustus was dead, he usurped all the
prerogatives of imperial state, gave the word to the Praetorian Cohorts;
had soldiers about the palace, guards about his person, went guarded in
the street, guarded to the Senate, and bore all the marks of Majesty: nay,
he writ letters to the several armies in the undisguised style of one
already their Prince: nor did he ever hesitate in expression, or speak
with perplexity, but when he spoke to the Senate. The chief cause of his
obscurity there proceeded from his fear of Germanicus: he dreaded that he,
who was master of so many legions, of numberless auxiliaries, and of all
the allies of Rome; he, who was the darling of the people, might wish
rather to possess the Empire, than to wait for it; he likewise, in this
mysterious way of dealing with the Senate, sought false glory, and would
rather seem by the Commonwealth chosen and called to the Empire, than to
have crept darkly into it by the intrigues of a woman, or by adoption from
a superannuated Prince. It was also afterwards found, that by this
abstruseness and counterfeit irresolution he meant to penetrate into the
designs and inclinations of the great men: for his jealous spirit
construed all their words, all their looks, into crimes; and stored them
up in his heart against a day of vengeance.

When he first met the Senate, he would bear no other business to be
transacted but that about the funeral of Augustus. His last will was
brought in by the Vestal Virgins: in it Tiberius and Livia were appointed
his heirs, Livia adopted into the Julian family, and dignified with the
name of Augusta: into the next and second degree of heirship he adopted
his grandchildren and their children; and in the third degree he named the
great men of Rome, most of them hated by him, but out of vainglory he
named them, and for future renown. His legacies were not beyond the usual