and placed
in a golden box some poison furnished to him by Locusta.

The last effort which he contemplated was to mount the Rostra, beg
pardon of the people for his crimes, ask them to try him again, and, at
the worst, to allow him the prefecture of Egypt. But this design he did
not dare to carry out, from fear that he would be torn to pieces before
he reached the Forum. Meanwhile he found that the palace had been
deserted by his guards, and that his attendants had robbed his chamber
even of the golden box in which he had stored his poison. Rushing out,
as though to drown himself in the Tiber, he changed his mind, and begged
for some quiet hiding-place in which to collect his thoughts. The
freedman Phaon offered him a lowly villa about four miles from the city.
Barefooted, and with a faded coat thrown over his tunic, he hid his head
and face in a kerchief and rode away with only four attendants. On the
road he heard the tumult of the praetorians cursing his name. Amid evil
omens and serious perils he reached the back of Phaon's villa, and,
creeping toward it through a muddy reed-bed, was secretly admitted into
one of its mean slave-chambers by an aperture through which he had to
crawl on his hands and feet.

There is no need to dwell on the miserable spectacle of his end, perhaps
the meanest and most pusillanimous which has ever been recorded. The
poor wretch who, without a pang, had caused so many brave Romans and so
many innocent Christians to be murdered could not summon up resolution
to die. He devised every operatic incident of which he could think. When
even his most degraded slaves urged him to have sufficient manliness to
save himself from the fearful infamies which otherwise awaited him, he
ordered his grave to be dug, and fragments of marble to be collected for
its adornment, and water and wood for his funeral pyre, perpetually
whining, "What an artist to perish!"

Meanwhile a courier arrived for Phaon. Nero snatched his despatches out
of his hand and read that the senate had decided that he should be
punished in the ancestral fashion as a public enemy. Asking what the
ancestral fashion was, he was informed that he would be stripped naked
and scourged to death with rods, with his head thrust into a fork.
Horrified at this, he seized two daggers, and, after theatrically trying
their edges, sheathed them again, with the excuse that the fatal moment
had not yet arrived! Then he bade Sporus begin to sing his fun