‘That is all the marble we can find,’ said Phaon.
‘Well, but you will have to burn my body,’ he said. ‘You must get some water to wash me, and some wood for the pyre.’
‘Nero, Nero,’ said Sporus to him again, ‘will you not die like a man?’
In the midst of these idle pretexts a runner came with a letter for Phaon. Nero snatched it out of his hand and read ‘that the Senate had pronounced him a public enemy, and decreed that he should be punished after the fashion of our ancestors.’
‘What punishment is that?’ he asked.
Is it possible that he did not know? He, who had so often heard it passed on others? he who, as men believed, had secretly wished that it should be inflicted on Antistius for libelling him? he who had suffered it to be pronounced against L. Vetus and the innocent Pollutia? Nevertheless Epaphroditus told him that it meant stripping him naked, thrusting his head into the opening of a forked gibbet, and then beating him to death with rods. Nero turned deadly pale. The thought of such agony and such outrage overwhelmed him. He plucked from their sheaths two daggers which he had brought with him, tried the edge of them, and then once more thrust them back with the threadbare tragic phrase, that ‘the destined hour had not yet come.’ Again the unhappy Sporus entreated him to remember that he was a man, a Roman, an Emperor.
‘There is time, boy,’ he said. ‘Sing my funeral song; raise a lamentation for me.’ And all the while he wept, and whimpered, ‘Such an artist! Such an artist to perish!’
Phaon and Epaphroditus rebuked his abject timidity.
‘Oh!’ he cried, ‘I cannot die. “Wife, father, mother, join to bid me die,” but I dare not. Will not one of you kill himself and show me how to die?’
They were amazed at such depths of abject selfishness, and, reading his condemnation in their faces, he groaned out, ‘Nero, Nero, this is infamy; come, rouse thyself; be a man!’