st ascend the funeral pyre and there be veritably burned
alive; and slaves and criminals must play their parts heroically in gold
and purple till the flames envelop them.

It was the ultimate romance of a degraded and brutalized society. The
Roman people, "victors once, now vile and base," could now only be
amused by sanguinary melodrama. Fables must be made realities, and the
criminal must gracefully transform his supreme agonies into amusements
for the multitude by becoming a gladiator or a tragedian. Such were the
spectacles at which Nero loved to gaze through his emerald eye-glass.
And worse things than these--things indescribable, unutterable. Infamous
mythologies were enacted, in which women must play their part in
torments of shamefulness more intolerable than death. A St. Peter must
hang upon the cross in the Pincian gardens, as a real Laureolus upon the
stage. A Christian boy must be the Icarus, and a Christian man the
Scaevola or the Hercules or the Orpheus of the amphitheatre; and
Christian women, modest maidens, holy matrons, must be the Danaids or
the Proserpine or worse, and play their parts as priestesses of Saturn
and Ceres, and in blood-stained dramas of the dead. No wonder that Nero
became to Christian imagination the very incarnation of evil; the
antichrist; the Wild Beast from the abyss; the delegate of the great red
Dragon, with a diadem and a name of blasphemy upon his brow. No wonder
that he left a furrow of horror in the hearts of men, and that, ten
centuries after his death, the church of Sta. Maria del Popolo had to be
built by Pope Pascal II to exorcise from Christian Rome his restless and
miserable ghost!

And it struck them with deeper horror to see that the antichrist, so far
from being abhorred, was generally popular. He was popular because he
presented to the degraded populace their own image and similitude. The
frog-like unclean spirits which proceeded, as it were, out of his mouth
were potent with these dwellers in an atmosphere of pestilence. They had
lost all love for freedom and nobleness; they cared only for doles and
excitement. Even when the infamies of a Petronius had been superseded by
the murderous orgies of Tigellinus, Nero was still everywhere welcomed
with shouts as a god on earth and saluted on all coins as Apollo, as
Hercules, as "the savior of the world." The poets still assured him
that there was no deity in heaven who would not think it an honor to
concede to him his p