Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - XXXI. The Regatta
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remark that they are “scarcely allowable to
be related and still less to be believed.” Before
the appearance of the Annals—eighty years after
the death of Tiberius—there was no public man
in Roman history with a cleaner record of a
noble and unblemished life than the old emperor.
None of the various writers on Tiberius, some of
them his contemporaries with first class
opportunities for picking up all the gossip of the evil
tongues of Rome, had a word to say about the
Capri orgies. Philo, the pious and learned Jew,
distinctly speaks of the clean and simple life
Caligula was forced to lead when staying with
his adopted grandfather in Capri. Even the
jackal Suetonius, forgetful of the wise saying of
Quintilian that a liar must have a good memory,
blunders into the information that Caligula, when
bent on some debauchery in Capri, had to
disguise himself in a wig to escape the stern eye
of the old Emperor. Seneca, the castigator of
vice, and Pliny—both his contemporaries—speak
of the austere solitude of Tiberius in Capri. Dio
Cassius it is true, makes some casual remarks
about these foul rumours but cannot help noticing
himself the inexplicable contradictions into which
he is falling. Even the scandal-loving Juvenal
speaks of the Emperor’s “tranquil old age” in
his island home, surrounded by his learned
friends and astronomers. Plutarch, the severe
upholder of morality, speaks of the old man’s
dignified solitude during the last ten years of his
life. That the story of the Capri orgies is
absolutely impossible from the point of view of
scientific psychology was already understood by
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