s, modest, sympathetic--in short, a flower in
a cesspool, a youth not over well-fitted to reign. But his mother was
there; as he developed so did his fear of her, to such proportions even
that he gave certain orders, and his mother was killed. That duel
between mother and son, terrible in its intensity and unnameable
horror, even the Borgias could not surpass. Tacitus has told it,
dramatically, as was his wont, but he told it in Latin, in which tongue
it had best remain.

At that time the ingenuous lad had disappeared. The cub was full-grown.
Besides, he had tasted blood. Octavia, who with her brother,
Britannicus, and her sister, Antonia, had been his playmates; who was
almost his own sister; whose earliest memories interlinked with his,
and who had become his wife, had been put to death; not that she had
failed to please, but because a lady, Sabina Poppoea, who, Tacitus
says, lacked nothing except virtue, had declined to be his mistress. At
the time Sabina was married. But divorce was easy. Sabina got one at
the bar; Nero with the axe. The twain were then united. Nero seems to
have loved her greatly, a fact, as Suetonius puts it, which did not
prevent him from kicking her to death. Already he had poisoned
Britannicus, and with Octavia decapitated and Agrippina gone, of the
imperial house there remained but Antonia and himself. The latter he
invited to marry him; she declined. He invited her to die. He was then
alone, the last of his race. Monsters never engender. A thinker who
passed that way thought him right to have killed his mother; her crime
was in giving him birth.

Therewith he was popular; more so even than Caligula, who was a poet,
and as such apart from the crowd, while Nero was frankly
canaille--well-meaning at that--which Caligula never was. During the
early years of his reign he could not do good enough. The gladiators
were not permitted to die; he would have no shedding of blood; the
smell of it was distasteful. He would listen to no denunciations; when
a decree of death was brought to him to sign, he regretted that he knew
how to write. Rome had never seen a gentler prince, nor yet one more
splendidly lavish. The people had not only the necessities of life, but
the luxuries, the superfluities, too. For days and days in the Forum
there was an incessant shower of tickets that were exchangeable, not
for bread or trivial sums, but for gems, pictures, slaves, fortunes,
ships, villas and estates. The creato