longer able to resist the blows and machinations of Sejanus, who
detached from it, one after another, all the men of any importance. He
either won them over to himself through his favors and his promises, or
he frightened them with his threats; and those who resisted most
tenaciously, he destroyed with his suits.

Tiberius was the storm-center of these struggles, and contrary to what
legend has reported, he attempted as far as he was able to prevent the
two parties from going to extremes. But what pain, repugnance, and
fatigue it must have cost him to make the effort necessary for
maintaining a last ray of reason and justice among so many evil
passions, animosities, ambitions, and rivalries! It must have cost him
dearly, for he had grown up in the time when the dream of a great
restoration of the aristocracy was luring the upper classes of Rome
with its fairest and most luminous smile. As a young man he had known
and loved Vergil, Horace, and Livy, the two poets and the historian of
this great dream; like all the elect spirits of those now distant
years, he had seen behind this vision a great senate, a glorious and
terrible army, an austere and revered republic like that which Livy had
pictured with glowing colors in his immortal pages.

Instead of all this, he was now forced to take his place at the head of
this decadent and wretched nobility, which seemed to be interested only
in rending itself asunder with calumnies, denunciations, suits, and
scandalous condemnations, and which repaid him for all that he had done
and was still doing for its safety and the prosperity of the empire by
directing against his name the most atrocious calumnies, the fiercest
railleries, and every sort of ridiculous and infamous legend. He had
dreamed of victories over the enemies of Rome, and he had to resign
himself to struggling day and night against the hysterical extravagance