Greece with the strangest company and the most singular design that
any monarch has ever entertained. With ten galleys he went forth from
Puteoli, carrying with him great stores of painted scenery and
theatrical properties, together with a number of knights and senators,
whom he feared to leave behind him at Rome, and who were all marked for
death in the course of his wanderings. In his train he took Natus, his
singing coach; Cluvius, a man with a monstrous voice, who should bawl
out his titles; and a thousand trained youths who had learned to applaud
in unison whenever their master sang or played in public. So deftly had
they been taught that each had his own role to play. Some did no more
than give forth a low deep hum of speechless appreciation. Some clapped
with enthusiasm. Some, rising from approbation into absolute frenzy,
shrieked, stamped, and beat sticks upon the benches. Some--and they were
the most effective--had learned from an Alexandrian a long droning
musical note which they all uttered together, so that it boomed over the
assembly. With the aid of these mercenary admirers, Nero had every hope,
in spite of his indifferent voice and clumsy execution, to return to
Rome, bearing with him the chaplets for song offered for free
competition by the Greek cities. As his great gilded galley with two
tiers of oars passed down the Mediterranean, the Emperor sat in his
cabin all day, his teacher by his side, rehearsing from morning to night
those compositions which he had selected, whilst every few hours a
Nubian slave massaged the Imperial throat with oil and balsam, that it
might be ready for the great ordeal which lay before it in the land of
poetry and song. His food, his drink, and his exercise were prescribed
for him as for an athlete who trains for a contest, and the twanging of
his lyre, with the strident notes of his voice, resounded continually
from the Imperial quarters.

Now it chanced that there lived in those days a Grecian goatherd named
Policles, who tended and partly owned a great flock which grazed upon
the long flanks of the hills near Her[oe]a, which is five miles north of
the river Alpheus, and no great distance from the famous Olympia. This
person was noted over all the country-side as a man of strange gifts and
singular character. He was a poet who had twice been crowned for his
verses, and he was a musician to whom the use and sound of an instrument
were so natural that one would more easily me