atter, if I had
condemned those two, I should have had to take others in place of them."

"And people would say, besides, that out of love for music thou
destroyest music in thy dominions. Never kill art for art's sake, O
divinity."

"How different thou art from Tigellinus!" answered Nero. "But seest
thou, I am an artist in everything; and since music opens for me
spaces the existence of which I had not divined, regions which I do
not possess, delight and happiness which I do not know, I cannot live a
common life. Music tells me that the uncommon exists, so I seek it with
all the power of dominion which the gods have placed in my hands. At
times it seems to me that to reach those Olympian worlds I must do
something which no man has done hitherto,--I must surpass the stature
of man in good or evil. I know that people declare me mad. But I am not
mad, I am only seeking. And if I am going mad, it is out of disgust and
impatience that I cannot find. I am seeking! Dost understand me? And
therefore I wish to be greater than man, for only in that way can I be
the greatest as an artist."

Here he lowered his voice so that Vinicius could not hear him, and,
putting his mouth to the ear of Petronius, he whispered,--"Dost know
that I condemned my mother and wife to death mainly because I wished
to lay at the gate of an unknown world the greatest sacrifice that man
could put there? I thought that afterward something would happen, that
doors would be opened beyond which I should see something unknown. Let
it be wonderful or awful, surpassing human conception, if only great and
uncommon. But that sacrifice was not sufficient. To open the empyrean
doors it is evident that something greater is needed, and let it be
given as the Fates desire."

"What dost thou intend to do?"

"Thou shalt see sooner than thou thinkest. Meanwhile be assured that
there are two Neros,--one such as people know, the other an artist, whom
thou alone knowest, and if he slays as does death, or is in frenzy
like Bacchus, it is only because the flatness and misery of common life
stifle him; and I should like to destroy them, though I had to use fire
or iron. Oh, how flat this world will be when I am gone from it! No man
has suspected yet, not thou even, what an artist I am. But precisely
because of this I suffer, and sincerely do I tell thee that the soul in
me is as gloomy as those cypresses which stand dark there in front of
us. It is grievous for a man to