Page:Tacitus; (IA tacituswilliam00donnrich).pdf/89

Rh treated as almost his partner in the empire, was false, mercy and justice alike departed from him, and the moody self-exile in Capri "let slip the dogs" of information against all who had followed and flattered, or were imagined to have done so, the arch-traitor Ælius Sejanus.

As regards his fame, no step Tiberius ever took was more fatal to it than his retiring to Capri. It was a mystery which no one of his subjects could fathom; but it was also a mystery that invited the worst interpretations. In the days of the commonwealth, a tribune of the people had increased his popularity by instructing an architect so to build him a house on the Capitoline Hill, that all his fellow-citizens might at any moment be able to see what he was doing. It was a similar seclusion in his Alban villa that rendered Domitian more obnoxious than ever to all classes in Rome. "No one," says Tacitus, "could have imagined that a Roman would voluntarily abandon his country for a period of eleven years." To modern ears the historian's words sound strangely. Capri was not so far from Rome as Edinburgh is from London, yet we should think the phrase extravagant, if a man, by going to the capital of Scotland, were accused of "abandoning" Britain. Far other import had the words in Roman ears.

Tiberius was in his sixty-seventh year when, on a pretext of dedicating a temple to Jupiter at Capua and to Augustus at Nola, he turned his back on Rome for ever. He was attended to the beautiful island of Capri, where he lived in seclusion for eleven years, by a very slender retinue;—by his minister Sejanus, now the ostensible if not the sole governor of the empire;