There is no need to dwell on the miserable spectacle of his end, perhaps the meanest and most pusillanimous which has ever been recorded. The poor wretch who, without a pang, had caused so many brave Romans and so many innocent Christians to be murdered could not summon up resolution to die. He devised every operatic incident of which he could think. When even his most degraded slaves urged him to have sufficient manliness to save himself from the fearful infamies which otherwise awaited him, he ordered his grave to be dug, and fragments of marble to be collected for its adornment, and water and wood for his funeral pyre, perpetually whining, "What an artist to perish!"
Meanwhile a courier arrived for Phaon. Nero snatched his despatches out of his hand and read that the senate had decided that he should be punished in the ancestral fashion as a public enemy. Asking what the ancestral fashion was, he was informed that he would be stripped naked and scourged to death with rods, with his head thrust into a fork. Horrified at this, he seized two daggers, and, after theatrically trying their edges, sheathed them again, with the excuse that the fatal moment had not yet arrived! Then he bade Sporus begin to sing his funeral song, and begged some one to show him how to die. Even his own intense shame at his cowardice was an insufficient stimulus, and he whiled away the time in vapid epigrams and pompous quotations. The sound of horses' hoofs then broke on his ears, and, venting one more Greek quotation, he held the dagger to his throat. It was driven home by Epaphroditus, one of his literary slaves. At this moment the centurion who came to arrest him rushed in. Nero was not yet dead, and under pretence of helping him the centurion began to stanch the wound with his cloak. "Too late," he said; "is this your fidelity?" So he died; and the bystanders were horrified with the way in which his eyes seemed to be starting out of his head in a rigid stare. He had begged that his body might be burned without posthumous insults, and this was conceded by Icelus, the freedman of Galbo.
So died the last of the Cæsars! And as Robespierre was lamented by his landlady, so even Nero was tenderly buried by two nurses who had known him in the exquisite beauty of his engaging childhood, and by Acte, who had inspired his youth with a genuine love.
But his history does not end with his grave. He was to live on in the expectation alike of Jews and Christians. The fifth head of the Wild Beast of the Revelation was in some sort to reappear as the eighth; the head with its diadem and its names of blasphemy had been wounded to death, but in the Apocalyptic sense the deadly wound was to be healed. The Roman world could not believe that the heir of the deified Julian race could be cut off thus suddenly and obscurely and vanish like foam upon the water. The Christians felt sure that it required something more than an ordinary death stroke to destroy the antichrist, and to end the vitality of the Wild Beast from the Abyss, who had been the first to set himself in deadly antagonism against the Redeemer and to wage war upon the saints of God.
FOOTNOTES:
[29] In his behavior at the burning of Rome.
[30] There can be little doubt that the name "Christian"—so curiously hybrid, yet so richly expressive—was a nickname due to the wit of the Antiochenes, which exercised itself quite fearlessly even on the Roman emperors. They were not afraid to affix nicknames to Caracalla, and to call Julian Cecrops and Victimarius, with keen satire of his beard. It is clear that the sacred writers avoided the name, because it was employed by their enemies, and by them mingled with terms of the vilest opprobrium. It only became familiar when the virtues of Christians had shed lustre upon it, and when alike in its true form, and in the ignorant mispronunciation "Chrestians," it readily lent itself to valuable allegorical meanings.
[31] According to John of Antioch and the Chronicon Paschale, Nero was originally favorable to the Christians, and put Pilate to death, for which the Jews plotted his murder. Poppæa's Judaism is inferred from her refusing to be burned, and requesting to be embalmed; from her adopting the custom of wearing a veil in the streets; from the favor which she showed to Aliturus and Josephus; and from the fact that Josephus speaks of her as a religious woman.
[32] Tiberius Alexander, the nephew of Philo, afterward procurator of Judea, was a person of influence at Rome; but he was a renegade, and would not be likely to hate the Christians. It is, however, remarkable that legend attributed the anger of Nero to the conversion of his mistress and a favorite slave.
[33] St. Peter—apparently thinking of the fire at Rome and its consequences—calls the persecution from which the Christians were suffering when he wrote his First Epistle a "conflagration."