But there are certain reservations which, to protect my good name, I wish to make.

First, the manuscript from which I worked is probably the only one in existence and is written on paper which dates only from the eighteenth century.

Second, Count Alessandro di Caltagirone is, I have gathered, a man with a dubious reputation. For one thing, this is certainly not his name, and it is doubtful if he is really a count. More alert readers will have made at once a connection which escaped me for some months. Caltagirone was the name of the monastery where Giuseppe Balsamo, better known as Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, was educated from 1760-69. Cagliostro of course -physician, philosopher, alchemist and necromancer – claimed to possess "the elixir of eternal youth", a phrase that has dropped also from my friend Caltagirone's lips, though I am bound to add that his appearance contradicts it.

When I asked him about the provenance of the manuscript, he was first evasive, then said he could certainly account for its whereabouts since 1770. What is one to make of that?

Even a cursory reading of the memoirs must inspire the critic with doubts. There are moments when Tiberius appears to have the sensibility which one associates with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment rather than with Ancient Rome. There is, too, a curious lack of detail about daily life in imperial Rome, and an absence of that awareness of religion which, despite other indications to the contrary, formed such an integral part of the superstitious Roman character. Such references as there are to this central experience of the Roman spirit are perfunctory, as if the author of the manuscript found the whole business a bore to which he nevertheless paid occasional heed. If one remembers that the eighteenth century saw the first revulsion from Tacitus, the traducer of Tiberius, a revulsion expressed, for instance, by both Voltaire and Napoleon, then it seems plausible to suggest that what we have here is an "Anti-Tacitus" composed by some mischievous intellectual of that time for his own diversion.