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96 without episodical digressions, is little more than a narrative of the contest between the emperor, the Julian family, and the senate. Tiberius, after Germanicus was recalled from the Rhine, succeeded in reducing the Roman world to a state of general acquiescence in his rule. The provinces, to all appearance, and indeed according to the account given of them by other writers, enjoyed the benefits of a general peace; and had every reason to be content with a Cæsar who did not oppress them by capricious or over-burdensome taxation, and who, by allowing both imperial and senatorial governors to remain long, and sometimes even for life, in office, delivered them from the harpies sent out at least triennially by the commonwealth. One great offence, in Tacitus's opinion, committed by Tiberius, was his politic neglect of minor disturbances abroad. He would not expend the forces of the empire upon petty wars in Africa or Gaul. He forbore to interfere with them in person: he let them either die out by exhaustion of the rebels themselves, or left them to be extinguished by his ordinary representatives, prætorian or proconsular. Tacitus, who wrote the 'History' and 'Annals' under the warlike Trajan—who not only put down revolt with his own hand, but considerably extended the boundaries of the empire—condemned the policy of Tiberius as either a culpable neglect or an inglorious timidity. But in his Dacian war, Trajan humbled an enemy who, in a few years more, might have imperilled Rome itself; and in his eastern campaigns taught the Parthians a lesson which they remembered until again invited to active measures by the decrepitude and decline of the empire itself.

Very early in the 'Annals' we are introduced to the