IF I WERE TO CONFINE MY ACCOUNT OF THE EVENTS OF THE next twenty-five years or more merely to my own performances it would not cost me much in paper and make very dull reading; but the later part of this autobiography, in which I figure more prominently, will only be intelligible if I continue here with the personal histories of Livia, Tiberius, Germanicus, Postumus, Castor, Livilla, and the rest, which are far from dull, I promise you.

       Postumus was in exile, and Germanicus was at the wars, and only Athenodorus remained of my true friends. Soon he left me too, returning to his native Tarsus. I did not grudge his going because he went at the urgent appeal of two of his nephews there who begged him to help him free the city from the tyranny of its governor. They wrote that this governor had insinuated himself so cleverly into their God Augustus's good graces that it would need the testimony of a man like Athenodorus, in whose integrity their God Augustus had complete confidence, to persuade their God Augustus that the fellow's expulsion was justified. Athenodorus succeeded in ridding the city of this blood-sucker, but afterwards found it impossible to return to Rome as he ' had intended. He was needed by his nephews to help them rebuild the city administration on a firm foundation. Augustus, to whom he wrote a detailed report of his actions, showed his gratitude and confidence by granting Tarsus, as a personal favour to him, a five years' remission from the Imperial tribute. I corresponded regularly with the good old man until his death two years later at the age of eighty-two. Tarsus honoured his memory with an annual festival and sacrifice; at which the leading citizens took turns to read his Short History of Tarsus through from beginning to end, starting at sunrise and finishing after sunset.

       Germanicus wrote to me occasionally, but his letters were as brief as they were affectionate: a really good commander has no time for writing letters home to his family, his entire time between campaigns being spent in getting to know his men and officers, in studying their comfort, in increasing their military efficiency, and in gathering information about the disposition and plans of his enemy. Germanicus was one of the most conscientious commanders who ever served in the Roman army-and more beloved even than our father. I was very proud when he wrote asking me to make for him, as quickly and thoroughly as I could, a digest of all reliable reports that I could find in the libraries on the domestic customs of the various Balkan tribes against whom he was fighting, the strength and geographical situation of their cities, and their traditional military tactics and ruses, particularly in guerrilla warfare. He said that he could not get enough reliable information locally: Tiberius had been most uncommunicative. With Sulpicius's help and a small group of professional researchmen and copyists working night and day I managed to get together exactly what he wanted and sent off a copy to him within a month or his asking for it. I was prouder than ever when he wrote to me not long afterwards for an edition of twenty copies of the book for circulation among his senior officers, for it had already proved of the greatest service to him. He said that every paragraph was clear and relevant, the most useful sections being those giving particulars of the secret extra-tribal military brotherhood against which, rather than against the tribes themselves, the war was being fought; and of the various sacred trees and bushes—a different sort was reverenced by each tribe-under whose protective shade the tribesmen were accustomed to bury their stores of corn, money and weapons when they had to abandon their villages in a hurry. He promised to tell Tiberius and Augustus of my valuable services.

       No public mention of this book was made, perhaps because if the enemy had heard of its existence they would have modified their tactics and dispositions. As it was, they believed that they were being constantly betrayed by informers, Augustus rewarded me unofficially by appointing me to a vacancy in the Augurs' College, but it was clear that he gave all the credit for the compilation to Sulpicius, though Sulpicius did not write a word-he merely found me some of the books. One of my chief authorities was Pollio, whose Dalmatian campaign bad been a model of military thoroughness combined with brilliant intelligencework. Though his account of local customs and conditions seemed nearly fifty years out of date, Germanicus found my extracts from it more helpful than any more recent campaign-history. I wished Pollio had been alive to hear that. I told Livy instead, who said rather crossly that he had never denied Pollio credit for writing competent military textbooks; he had merely denied him the title of historian in the higher sense.

       I must add to this, that if I had been more tactful I am pretty sure that Augustus would have commended me in his speech to the Senate at the conclusion of the war. But my references to his own Balkan campaigns had been fewer than they might have been had he written a detailed account of it, as Pollio did of his; or, if the official historians had been less concerned with flattering their Emperor, and more with recording his successes and reverses in an unprejudiced, technical way. I could extract little or no useful matter from these eulogies and Augustus in reading my book must have felt himself slighted. He identified himself so closely with the success of the war that during the last two campaigning seasons he moved from Rome to a town on the North-East frontier of Italy, to be as near as he could to the fighting; and as Commander-in-Chief of the Roman Armies he was continually sending Tiberius not very helpful military advice.

       I was now working on an account of my grandfather's part in the Civil Wars: but I had not gone very far before I was once more stopped by Livia. I only managed to complete two volumes. She told me that I was no more capable of writing a life of my grandfather than a life of my father and that I had behaved dishonestly in starting it behind her back. If I wanted a useful employment for my pen, I had better choose a subject that did not allow of so much misrepresentation. She offered me one: the reorganization of religion by Augustus since the Pacification. It was not an exciting subject, but had not been treated before in any detail and I was quite willing to undertake it. Augustus's religious reforms had been almost without exception excellent; he bad revived several ancient societies of priests, built and endowed eighty-two new temples in Rome and its environs, re-edified numerous old ones that were falling into decay, introduced foreign cults for the benefit of visiting provincials and re-instituted a number of interesting old public festivals that had been allowed to lapse one after the other during the civil disturbances of the previous half-century. I went into the subject very closely and completed my survey within a few days of the death of Augustus six years later. It was in forty-one volumes, averaging five thousand words apiece, but a great deal of this consisted of transcripts of religious decrees, nominal lists of priests, catalogues of gifts made to temple treasuries and so on. The most valuable volume was the introductory one dealing with primitive ritual at Rome. Here I found myself in difficulties, because Augustus's ritualistic reforms were based on the findings of a religious commission which had not done its work properly. There had apparently been no antiquarian expert among the commissioners, so that a number of gross misunderstandings of ancient religious formulas had been embodied in the new official liturgies.

       (1) Nobody who has not made a study of the Etruscan and Sabine languages is capable of correctly interpreting the more ancient of our religious incantations; and I devoted a great deal of my time to mastering the rudiments of both. At this time there were a few countrymen who still talked nothing but Sabine in the home and I persuaded two of them to come to Rome and provide Pallas, who was now acting as my secretary, with material for a short Sabine dictionary. I paid them well for this. Gallon, the best of my other secretaries, I sent to Capua to collect material for a similar dictionary of the Etruscan language from Aruns, the priest who had given me the information about Lars Porsena which had so pleased Pollio and so disgusted Livy. These two dictionaries, which later I enlarged and published, enabled me to clear up, to my own satisfaction, a number of outstanding problems of ancient religious worships; but I had learned to be careful and nothing that I wrote reflected on Augustus's scholarship or judgment.

      I will not spend any time on an account of the Balkan War, beyond saying that in spite of the wise generalship of my uncle Tiberius, the able assistance given him by my father-in-law Silvanus, and the dashing exploits of Germanicus, it dragged on for three years. In the end the whole country was reduced, and practically made into a desert, because these tribes, men and women, fought with extraordinary desperation and only acknowledged defeat when fire, famine and plague had more than halved the population. When the rebel leaders came to Tiberius to treat for peace he questioned them closely. He wanted to know why they had taken it into their heads to revolt in the first instance and then to offer so desperate a resistance. The chief rebel, a man called Bato, answered: "You yourselves are to blame. You send as guardians of your flocks neither shepherds nor watch-dogs, but wolves."

       This was not exactly true. Augustus chose the governors of his frontier provinces himself and paid them a substantial salary and saw to it that they did not divert any of the Imperial revenues into their own pockets. Taxes were paid directly to them, no longer farmed out to unprincipled tax-collecting companies. Augustus's governors were never wolves, as had been most of the republican governors whose only interest in their provinces was how much they could squeeze out of them. Many of them were good watch-dogs and some were even honest shepherds. But it often happened that Augustus would unintentionally put the tax at too high a rate, discounting the distress caused by a bad harvest or a cattle plague or an earthquake; and rather than complain to him that the assessment was too high the governors would collect it to the last penny, even at the risk of revolt. Few of them took any personal interest in the people they were supposed to govern. A governor would settle in the Romanized capital town, where there were houses and theatres and temples and public baths and markets, and never think of visiting the outlying districts of his province. The real governing was done by deputies and by deputies of deputies and there must have been a great deal of petty jack-in-office oppression by the smaller men: perhaps it was these whom Bato called wolves, though "fieas" would have been a better word. There can be no doubt that under Augustus the provinces were infinitely more prosperous than under the Republic, and further that the home-provinces, which were governed by nominees of the Senate, were not nearly so well off as the frontier-provinces governed by Augustus's nominees. This comparison provided one of the few plausible arguments that I ever heard advanced against republican government; though based on the untenable hypothesis that the standard of personal morality among the leading men of an average republic is likely to be lower than the personal morality of an average absolute monarch and his chosen subordinates; and on the fallacy that the question of how the provinces are governed is more important than the question of what happens in the City. To recommend a monarchy on account of the prosperity it gives the provinces seems to me like recommending that a man should have liberty to treat his children as slaves, if at the same time he treats his slaves with reasonable consideration.

       For this costly and wasteful war a great triumph was decreed by the Senate for Augustus and Tiberius. It will be recalled that now only Augustus himself or members of his family were to be permitted a proper triumph, other generals being awarded what were called "triumphal ornaments". Germanicus, though a Cassar, was granted only these ornaments, on technical grounds. Augustus might have stretched the point but was so grateful to Tiberius for his successful conduct of the war that he did not wish to antagonize him by giving Germanicus equal honours with him. Germanicus was also raised a degree in magisterial rank, and allowed to become Consul several years before the customary age. Castor, though he had taken no part in the war, was granted the privilege of attending meetings of the Senate before becoming a member of it, and was also advanced a degree in magisterial rank.

       At Rome the populace was looking forward with excitement to the triumph, which would mean largesse in corn and money and all sorts of good things: but a great disappointment was in store for them. A month before the date fixed for the triumph a terrible omen was observed-in Mars Field the temple of the War God was struck by lightning and nearly destroyed-and a few days later news came through from Germany of the heaviest military reverse suffered by Roman arms since Can-has, I might even say since The Allia, not quite four hundred years before. Three regiments had been massacred and all conquests east of the Rhine had been lost at a stroke; it seemed that there was nothing to prevent the Germans crossing the river and laying waste the three settled and prosperous provinces of France.

       I have already told of the crushing effect that this news had on Augustus. He felt it so strongly because he was not only officially responsible for the disaster, as the man charged by the Roman Senate and people with the security of all frontiers, but morally responsible as well. The disaster had been due to his imprudence in trying to force civilization on the barbarians too rapidly. The Germans conquered by my father had been gradually adapting themselves to Roman ways, learning the use of coinage, holding regular markets, building and furnishing houses

      ,, in civilized style, and even meeting in assemblies that did not end, as their former assemblies had always ended, inv armed battles. They were allies in name and if they had been allowed to forget their old barbarous ways gradually and to rely on the Roman garrison to protect them from their still uncivilized neighbours while they enjoyed the luxuries of provincial peace, they would no doubt in a couple of generations or less have grown as peaceful and docile as the French of Provence. But Varus, a connection of mine, whom Augustus appointed Governor of Germany Across the Rhine, began treating them not as allies but as a subject race: he was a vicious man and showed little regard for the extraordinarily strong feelings that Germans have about the chastity of their women-folk. Then Augustus needed money for the military treasury which the Balkan War had emptied. He imposed a number of new taxes from which the Across-Rhine Germans were not exempted. Varus advised him as to the paying capacity of the province and in his zeal assessed it too high.

       There were in............