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Rh skilful arrangement of his facts, and his enthusiasm for republican virtues, the reader of his works, passive in his hands, often yields implicit evidence to his record of imperial enormities.

Tacitus admits that the affairs of Tiberius, Caius (Caligula), Claudius, and Nero were misrepresented while they survived by fear, and after their deaths, by hatred; and, as regards Nero, this admission is repeated by Josephus. There is, indeed, reason for believing that the odium in which Tiberius was held, increased as time went on. In spite, however, of this statement, the historian throughout the 'Annals' appears to lean to the detractor's side, and represents the Claudian and Julian Cæsars in the spirit of his own generation; the third, that is, after their respective reigns. In the time both of the Flavian emperors and of Nerva and Trajan, there was a strong reaction against the despotism of the earlier dynasty;—a recoil from the extravagance of the Caian, Claudian, and Neronian period. From the bondage in which the senate was held by the emperors, from the influence of women and freedmen, and the liberty, or more truly the licence, granted to public informers, a writer contemporary with Trajan, and one who had escaped from the caprices of Domitian, naturally looked back on a period of general misrule with aversion on a par with that which the Long Parliament felt for the administration of Charles, Strafford, Buckingham, and Laud, or with that which the statesmen of 1789 felt for the Bastille, the taxes and services of the ancient régime, and its feudal and royal abuses. Towards the earlier emperors, perhaps not excluding Augustus, the feelings of Tacitus may be aptly conveyed in the words which