How many of his fancied enemies, how many of the innocent, had he caused to be decapitated! How often had he allowed their heads to be the mockery of their enemies! How had he himself insulted the ghastly relics of Sulla and of Rubellius Plautus; and suffered his mother and his wife to insult the murdered remains of Lollia Paulina, and of the sad and innocent Octavia! His one dread was that his head should be similarly insulted; his one main entreaty to the companions of his flight had been that he should be burnt whole, and his head not be given to his enemies.

Fairer and kinder measure was dealt to him than he had dealt to others. Among those who hurried to the villa was Icelus, the powerful freedman of his rival Galba. Nero had thrown him into prison at the news of Galba’s revolt, but at Nero’s flight he had been set free. It was not the usual way with the Romans to make war with the dead, and Icelus gave permission that the body should be burnt. It was consumed in the white robe broidered with gold which he had worn at his ill-omened sacrifice on the first of January.

No hindrance was put in the way of his funeral. Two women who had nursed his infancy, and Acte, who had loved him in his youth, wept over his bier. No tear was shed besides. They laid his ashes in a porphyry sarcophagus, over which was raised an altar of the white marble of Luna, surrounded by a Thasian balustrade.

He was but thirty-one when he died; and he had crowded all that colossal criminality, all that mean rascality, all that insane degradation, extravagance, and lust, into a reign of fourteen years!

So great was the exultation over his fall of the people whom he had pampered, that the whole body of plebeians appeared in the streets wearing hats. A slave could only wear a hat after he had been manumitted, and the people wished to show that by his death they had been emancipated from slavery. Yet he and they had mutually corrupted each other, and the vicious populace had reacted on the vicious ruler. Nor was it long before those to whom vice was dear began to show their sympathy by adorning his tomb with spring and summer flowers. Every base and foul ruler who succeeded him—lascivious Otho, gluttonous Vitellius, savage Domitian, womanish Elagabalus, brutal Commodus—all who disgraced the name of Roman and of man—made him their ideal and their hero.

And since so very few had witnessed his death, the multitude in every land persisted in the belief that another body and not his had been burnt; that he had taken refuge among the Parthians; that he would return to take vengeance on his enemies. The fancy gilded the brief fortune and precipitated the miserable punishment of at least two impostors. Of these Perkin Warbecks and Lambert Simnels of antiquity, one was put to death in the reign of Otho, the other in the reign of Domitian; and for nearly three centuries the legend lingered on in the Christian Church that Nero was the wild beast, wounded to death, but whose deadly wound had been healed—the Antichrist who should return again.

And the people fancied that his restless, miserable ghost haunted for centuries the Collis Hortulorum, the Monte Pincio, where stood the monument of the Domitii; until in pity for their terrors it was exorcised in 1099 by Pope Pascal II., the superb successor of the humble Linus. The Church of Santa Maria del Popolo stands to this day as a witness of the changed fortunes of that Church which Nero well-nigh extinguished and exterminated when he made light more ghastly than the darkness by kindling those living torches in the gardens of the Mons Vaticanus. Over that desecrated spot, as I have said, now falls the shadow of the vast Christian basilica, and the obelisk of Heliopolis, which towered over Nero as he drove his chariot through lines of burning men, testifies by its triumphant inscriptions to the victory of the faith of Christ.

CHAPTER LXVI
L’ENVOI

‘Many kings have sat down upon the ground, and one that was never thought of hath worn the crown.’—Ecclus. xi. 5.

‘All is best, though we oft doubt