d dare to raise a hand on such a demigod
did not enter his head. He felt himself really Olympian, and therefore
safe. The excitement and the madness of the crowd roused his own
madness. In fact, it might seem in the day of that triumph that not
merely Caesar and the city, but the world, had lost its senses.

Through the flowers and the piles of wreaths no one could see the
precipice. Still that same evening columns and walls of temples were
covered with inscriptions, describing Nero's crimes, threatening him
with coming vengeance, and ridiculing him as an artist. From mouth to
mouth went the phrase, "He sang till he roused the Gauls." Alarming news
made the rounds of the city, and reached enormous measures. Alarm seized
the Augustians. People, uncertain of the future, dazed not express hopes
or wishes; they hardly dared to feel or think.

But he went on living only in the theatre and music. Instruments newly
invented occupied him, and a new water-organ, of which trials were made
on the Palatine. With childish mind, incapable of plan or action, he
imagined that he could ward off danger by promises of spectacles and
theatrical exhibitions reaching far into the future, Persons nearest
him, seeing that instead of providing means and an army, he was merely
searching for expressions to depict the danger graphically, began to
lose their heads. Others thought that he was simply deafening himself
and others with quotations, while in his soul he was alarmed and
terrified. In fact, his acts became feverish. Every day a thousand new
plans flew through his head. At times he sprang up to rush out against
danger; gave command to pack up his lutes and citharae, to arm the young
slave women as Amazons, and lead the legions to the East. Again he
thought to finish the rebellion of the Gallic legions, not with war, but
with song; and his soul laughed at the spectacle which was to follow
his conquest of the soldiers by song. The legionaries would surround
him with tears in their eyes; he would sing to them an epinicium, after
which the golden epoch would begin for him and for Rome. At one time he
called for blood; at another he declared that he would be satisfied
with governing in Egypt. He recalled the prediction which promised
him lordship in Jerusalem, and he was moved by the thought that as
a wandering minstrel he would earn his daily bread,--that cities and
countries would honor in him, not Caesar, the lord of the earth, but a
poet wh