Lygia and Ursus were not among the condemned.

Chapter LXI

DARKNESS had not come when the first waves of people began to flow into
Caesar's gardens. The crowds, in holiday costume, crowned with flowers,
joyous, singing, and some of them drunk, were going to look at the new,
magnificent spectacle. Shouts of "Semaxii! Sarmentitii!" were heard on
the Via Tecta, on the bridge of AEmilius, and from the other side of the
Tiber, on the Triumphal Way, around the Circus of Nero, and off towards
the Vatican Hill. In Rome people had been seen burnt on pillars before,
but never had any one seen such a number of victims.

Caesar and Tigellinus, wishing to finish at once with the Christians and
also to avoid infection, which from the prisons was spreading more and
more through the city, had given command to empty all dungeons, so that
there remained in them barely a few tens of people intended for the
close of the spectacles. So, when the crowds had passed the gates,
they were dumb with amazement. All the main and side alleys, which
lay through dense groves and along lawns, thickets, ponds, fields,
and squares filled with flowers, were packed with pillars smeared with
pitch, to which Christians were fastened. In higher places, where the
view was not hindered by trees, one could see whole rows of pillars and
bodies decked with flowers, myrtle, and ivy, extending into the distance
on high and low places, so far that, though the nearest were like masts
of ships, the farthest seemed colored darts, or staffs thrust into the
earth. The number of them surpassed the expectation of the multitude.
One might suppose that a whole nation had been lashed to pillars for
Rome's amusement and for Caesar's. The throng of spectators stopped
before single masts when their curiosity was roused by the form or the
sex of the victim; they looked at the faces, the crowns, the garlands
of ivy; then they went farther and farther, asking themselves with
amazement, "Could there have been so many criminals, or how could
children barely able to walk have set fire to Rome?" and astonishment
passed by degrees into fear.

Meanwhile darkness came, and the first stars twinkled in the sky. Near
each condemned person a slave took his place, torch in hand; when the
sound of trumpets was heard in various parts of the gardens, in sign
that the spectacle was to begin, each slave put his torch to the foot
of a pillar. The straw, hidden under the flowers and steep