the ancient Romans had left us in the way of history.

So great is the repute of the Author of the Annals for supremacy
in the historian's art that Justus Lipsius places no faith
whatever in Suetonius when that, possibly, most veracious
historian records in his Life of Tiberius (61) the number of the
people who were executed for their attachment to Sejanus as
amounting to twenty; the universally applauded, and, generally
considered, most judicious Batavian critic of the sixteenth
century, without a manuscript or edition for his authority, alters
this number for One Thousand, because the author of the Annals
speaks of a "countless" mass of slain of all ranks, ages, and both
(he says "all") sexes, and further describes corpses as lying
about singly or piled up in heaps: "jacuit _immensa_ strages,
omnis sexus, omnis aetas, illustres, ignobiles, dispersi aut
aggerati" (VI. 19).

Hence, too, Dr. Nipperdey, in drawing up a table of the Augustan
family, in order to guard the reader against being perplexed by
the relationships of that house, treats the same Suetonius as of
no account when he says,--and Suetonius twice says it (Cal. I.,
Ner. 5),--that Drusus, the brother of Tiberius, married "the
younger Antonia." "In default of other evidence on the question of
fact," says the learned professor, "we must follow the better
author, Tacitus,"--the better author being the writer of the
Annals, who, on two occasions (I. 42; XII. 64), makes the "elder
Antonia" the wife of Drusus.

Examples of this description could be multiplied. But it is not
necessary to pursue this line of argument farther,--at least, at