HKB
authority of the Prince, by referring all things to that of the Senate; since it was the indispensable prerogative of sovereignty for all men to be accountable only to one."
Now at Rome, Consuls, Senators, and Roman Knights, were all rushing with emulation into bondage, and the higher the quality of each the more false and forward the men; all careful so to frame their faces, as to reconcile false joy for the accession of Tiberius, with feigned sadness for the loss of Augustus: hence they intermingled fears with gladness, wailings with gratulations, and all with servile flattery. Sextus Pompeius and Sextus Apuleius, at that time Consuls, took first the oath of fidelity to Tiberius; then administered it to Seius Strabo and Caius Turranius; the former Captain of the Praetorian Guards, the other Intendant of the Public Stores. The oath was next given to the Senate, to the people, and to the soldiery: all by the same Consuls; for Tiberius affected to derive all public transactions from the legal ministry of the Consuls, as if the ancient Republic still subsisted, and he were yet unresolved about embracing the sovereign rule: he even owned in his edict for summoning the Senate, that he issued it by virtue of the Tribunitial power, granted him under Augustus. The edict, too, was short and unexceptionably modest. It imported that, "they were to consider of the funeral honours proper to be paid his deceased Father: for himself he would not depart from the corpse; and further than this edict implied, he claimed no share in the public administration." Yet from the moment Augustus was dead, he usurped all the prerogatives of imperial state, gave the word to the Praetorian Cohorts; had soldiers about the palace, guards about his person, went guarded in the street, guarded to the Senate, and bore all the marks of Majesty: nay, he writ letters to the several armies in the undisguised style of one already their Prince: nor did he ever hesitate in expression, or speak with perplexity, but when he spoke to the Senate. The chief cause of his obscurity there proceeded from his fear of Germanicus: he dreaded that he, who was master of so many legions, of numberless auxiliaries, and of all the allies of Rome; he, who was the darling of the people, might wish rather to possess the Empire, than to wait for it; he likewise, in this mysterious way of dealing with the Senate, sought false glory, and would rather seem by the Commonwealth chosen and called to the Empire, than to have crept darkly into it by the intrigues of a woman, or by adoption from a superannuated Prince. It was also afterwards found, that by this abstruseness and counterfeit irresolution he meant to penetrate into the designs and inclinations of the great men: for his jealous spirit construed all their words, all their looks, into crimes; and stored them up in his heart against a day of vengeance.