done up in a chignon, the skin covered with
eruptions, the eyes circled and yellow; a woman who had hours when she
imitated a virgin at bay, others when she was wife, still others when
she expected to be a mother, and that woman, a senatorial patent of
divinity aiding, was god--Apollo's peer, imperator, chief of the army,
pontifix maximus, master of the world, with the incontestable right of
life and death over every being in the dominions.

It had taken the fresh-faced lad who blushed so readily, just fourteen
years to effect that change. Did he regret it? And what should Nero
regret? Nothing, perhaps, save that at the moment when he declared
himself to be lodged like a man, he had not killed himself like one.
But of that he was incapable. Had he known what the future held,
possibly he might have imitated that apotheosis of vulgarity in which
Sardanapalus eclipsed himself, but never could he have died with the
good breeding and philosophy of Cato, for neither good breeding nor
philosophy was in him. Nero killed himself like a coward, yet that he
did kill himself, in no matter what fashion, is one of the few things
that can be said in his favor.

Those days differed from ours. There were circumstances in which
suicide was regarded as the simplest of duties. Nero did his duty, but
not until he was forced to it, and even then not until he had been
asked several times whether it was so hard to die. The empire had
wearied of him. In Neropolis his popularity had gone as popularity ever
does; the conflagration had killed it.

Even as he wandered, lyre in hand, a train of Lesbians and pederasts at
his heels, through those halls which had risen on the ruins, and which
inexhaustible Greece had furnished with a fresh crop of white
immortals, the world rebelled. Afar on the outskirts of civilization a
vassal, ashamed of his vassalage, declared war, not against Rome, but
against an emperor that played the flute. In Spain, in Gaul, the
legions were choosing other chiefs. The provinces, depleted by imperial
exactions, outwearied by the increasing number of accusers, whose
accusations impoverishing them served only to multiply the
prodigalities of their Caesar, revolted.

Suddenly Nero found himself alone. As the advancing rumor of rebellion
reached him, he thought of flight; there was no one that would
accompany him. He called to the pretorians; they would not hear.
Through the immensity of his palace he sought one friend. The do