9.

For the sake of public opinion he styled himself
as serving at the pleasure of the people,
not as one who had slithered into office
through a senile adoption and his mother’s machinations.
Later it was understood that his tentativeness
was in fact a device for probing the will of the powerful.
He twisted words and faces into crimes.
His mind was a warehouse of falsified evidence.


12. 

Augustus was made a god.
Then all prayer turned toward Tiberius.
He propounded variously the immensity of empire and
his own modest conduct. Only the mind of
the divine Augustus had possessed
the capacity for such a burden, he said.
When Augustus called on me to share his duties,
I learned by experience how difficult,
how subject to chance, is the whole business of power.
How fortunate, then, he continued, that the state could lean
on so many illustrious men, that all things
need not answer to one man.
Far better that together we prosecute
the commonweal of the Republic.