Once, when an acquaintance of his youth attempted to remind him of times gone by, he cut the man off in mid-flow: ‘I do not remember what I was.’57 Much the same might have been said of the vanished Republic. The virtues and ideals to which Tiberius remained emotionally committed were no longer what they were – and Tiberius knew it. The last generation that remembered them as more than quaint anachronisms was inexorably passing away.
