“Is it then so hard to die?”
He would have gone and thrown himself into the Tiber. One of his freedmen, named Phaon, offered his villa as a refuge. It was about four miles from Rome. It is easily identified still, situated between the Via Salaria and the Via Nomentana. For this he started, wearing a rough dress and barefoot and with a mantle of coarse material about his shoulders and face. In this disguise he was mounted on a horse and was accompanied by four friends, Phaon, Epaphroditus (who was another wealthy freedman, the secretary or librarian of Nero), Sporus, and one more whose name is not given. He passed through the city gate at early dawn, not far from the Prætorian camp. Some accounts declare that he could hear soldiers cursing his name and declaring that Galba would be his successor. It is said that thunder and lightning and the shock of earthquake added to the excitement of the hour, while the sky was draped with heavy black clouds. They met some people hurrying into the city. One asked what news there might be from the palace.
NOMENTANA BRIDGE
Before crossing the Nomentana bridge, over the Anio, a bridge that is still standing, Nero’s horse shied, frightened at a dead man lying by the roadside. This caused the emperor’s disguise to slip aside for a moment, so that a messenger from the Prætorian camp, passing just then, recognized his face. Near the fourth milestone they turned aside and followed a path through a canebrake along the edge of a ditch, now called the Fosso della Cecchina. This brought them to the rear of Phaon’s villa, for they had not approached the main entrance that they might escape observation. A hole had to be made in the back wall of the house. When it was completed, they crept through it into a bath-room, where Nero threw himself upon a pallet. His comrades urged him at once to escape by suicide from the indignities which would be heaped upon him by his foes as soon as he was captured. Presently word was brought to him that the Senate had decreed his death as an enemy to Rome. Terrified at this Nero took two daggers from his bosom, and with many grimaces tried their edges, one after another, and then laid them down, saying that the moment for him to use them had not yet come. Then he implored some one to set him the example of suicide. He reproached himself for his timidity.
“Fie, fie, Nero!” he cried, “Courage, man; come!”
Hearing then the sound of horsemen sent to seize him alive, he placed a weapon to his throat and his freedman Epaphroditus drove it home. This was on the ninth of June, in the 14th year of his reign and when he was at the age of thirty years and six months.
He was the last of the Julian family. Though few were disposed to weep at his departure and though multitudes throughout the empire felt relief when they heard of it, his body was not refused a decent burial. By the consent of Icelus, representing Galba, the newly elected emperor, Ecloge and Alexandra, who had been the nurses of his childhood, with Acte, who had been a companion in his vices, and the three men who had accompanied him in his flight furnished the money for the cremation of his body, with suitable ceremonies.
The three women brought the ashes and placed them in the tomb of the Domitian family. This stood on a spur of the Pincian Hill, not far behind the present church of Santa Maria del Popolo, just inside the city gate and in the square of the same name. Lanciani speaks of the discovery (in a very recent year, on the exact spot of Nero’s suicide) of the tomb of Claudia Ecloge, the old nurse who had been so devoted to the emperor when a child. The fields around the spot for hundreds of feet in every direction are said to have been strewn with the usual ruins of a villa of the first century and the finding of this simple slab is a most pathetic incident, in view of the details that we have described. Lord Byron says in “Don Juan”: