But how could the soul of this vicious, babyish, self-indulgent, overgrown, corrupted boy—this soul steeped through and through its every fibre with selfishness, vanity, and crime—how could it be thrilled with one virile impulse? The man within him was dead—only the cowardly animal survived.
The sound of horses’ hoofs was heard galloping along the rough road leading to the villa. It denoted the approach of horsemen who had been bidden at all hazards to seize him alive.Strange that even at such a moment he could not help being self-conscious and melodramatic.
‘“Thunder of swift-foot coursers smites my ears.”’[121]
he said, trembling—quoting a verse of Homer. But at last, when not one second was to be lost, he placed the dagger against his throat, and, seeing that he would be too much of a poltroon to inflict anything more than an ineffectual wound, Epaphroditus with one thrust drove it home.
Then in burst the centurion. Anxious to seize him alive, he cried, ‘Stay, stay, Nero! I have come to help you!’ and tried with his cloak to stanch the bleeding wound.
‘Too late,’ gasped the dying wretch.—‘Is this your fidelity?’
With these words he died, and the spectators were horror-stricken at the wild, staring look of his rigid eyes, which seemed to stand out of his head.
Fidelity! What fidelity had Nero himself shown to God, to human nature, to Rome, to his mother, his adoptive father, his wives, his brother, his tutors, his family, his friends, his slaves, his freedmen, his people, his own self? What more worthless life was ever disgraced by a more contemptible and abject death?
Forty-one princes and princesses of his race had perished since the beginning of the century, by the sword, by famine, or by poison; and the historian imagines the shades of those unhappy ones gathered round the miserable pallet on which—more miserably, more pusillanimously, more guiltily, more abjectly than any one of them—perished the last of a race whom heaven had been supposed to receive as gods, and whom earth rejected with disgust. And had their race ended in this manikin, in this cowardly and corrupted actor? ‘The first of the Cæsars,’ says the historian, ‘had married four times; the second thrice; the third twice; the fourth thrice again; the fifth six times; and lastly this sixth Cæsar thrice:—of these repeated unions a large number had borne offspring.’ Where were they all? Cut off for the most part by open murder, or secret suicide, or diseases mysterious and premature! And now the prophecy of the sibyl had been fulfilled—
‘Last of the Æneadæ shall reign—a matricide!’