eral song,
and begged some one to show him how to die. Even his own intense shame
at his cowardice was an insufficient stimulus, and he whiled away the
time in vapid epigrams and pompous quotations. The sound of horses'
hoofs then broke on his ears, and, venting one more Greek quotation, he
held the dagger to his throat. It was driven home by Epaphroditus, one
of his literary slaves. At this moment the centurion who came to arrest
him rushed in. Nero was not yet dead, and under pretence of helping him
the centurion began to stanch the wound with his cloak. "Too late," he
said; "is this your fidelity?" So he died; and the bystanders were
horrified with the way in which his eyes seemed to be starting out of
his head in a rigid stare. He had begged that his body might be burned
without posthumous insults, and this was conceded by Icelus, the
freedman of Galbo.

So died the last of the Caesars! And as Robespierre was lamented by his
landlady, so even Nero was tenderly buried by two nurses who had known
him in the exquisite beauty of his engaging childhood, and by Acte, who
had inspired his youth with a genuine love.

But his history does not end with his grave. He was to live on in the
expectation alike of Jews and Christians. The fifth head of the Wild
Beast of the Revelation was in some sort to reappear as the eighth; the
head with its diadem and its names of blasphemy had been wounded to
death, but in the Apocalyptic sense the deadly wound was to be healed.
The Roman world could not believe that the heir of the deified Julian
race could be cut off thus suddenly and obscurely and vanish like foam
upon the water. The Christians felt sure that it required something more
than an ordinary death stroke to destroy the antichrist, and to end the
vitality of the Wild Beast from the Abyss, who had been the first to set
himself in deadly antagonism against the Redeemer and to wage war upon
the saints of God.

FOOTNOTES:

[29] In his behavior at the burning of Rome.

[30] There can be little doubt that the name "Christian"--so curiously
hybrid, yet so richly expressive--was a nickname due to the wit of the
Antiochenes, which exercised itself quite fearlessly even on the Roman
emperors. They were not afraid to affix nicknames to Caracalla, and to
call Julian Cecrops and Victimarius, with keen satire of his beard. It
is clear that the sacred writers avoided the name, because it was
employed by their enemies, and by them mingled