As the augur Lentulus and others argued on various grounds against this view, the result was that they awaited the decision of the supreme pontiff. Tiberius deferred any investigation into the priest's legal position, but he modified the ceremonies which had been decreed in honour of Drusus's tribunitian power with special censure on the extravagance of the proposed inscription in gold, so contrary to national usage. Letters also from Drusus were read, which, though studiously modest in expression, were taken to be extremely supercilious. "We have fallen so low," people said, "that even a mere youth who has received so high an honour does not go as a worshipper to the city's gods, does not enter the Senate, does not so much as take the auspices on his country's soil. There is a war, forsooth, or he is kept from us in some remote part of the world. Why, at this very moment, he is on a tour amid the shores and lakes of Campania. Such is the training of the future ruler of mankind; such the lesson he first learns from his father's counsels. An aged emperor may indeed shrink from the citizen's gaze, and plead the weariness of declining years and the toils of the past. But, as for Drusus, what can be his hindrance but pride?"
Complete Works of Tacitus. Tacitus. Alfred John Church. William Jackson Brodribb. Sara Bryant. edited for Perseus. New York. : Random House, Inc. Random House, Inc. reprinted 1942.
