Historical Tales [calibre 5.4.1]

This incident increased Nero's fear. His route of flight would now be known. He pressed his horse to the utmost speed until Phaon's house was close at hand. They now halted and Nero dismounted, it being thought unsafe for him to enter the house publicly. He crossed a field overgrown with reeds, and, being tortured with thirst, scooped up some water from a muddy ditch and drank it, saying, dolefully, "Is this the beverage which Nero has been used to drink?"

Phaon advised him to conceal himself in a neighboring sandpit, from which could be opened for him a subterraneous passage to the house, but Nero refused, saying that he did not care to be buried alive. His companions then made an opening in the wall on one side of the house, through which Nero crept on his hands and knees. Entering a wretched chamber, he threw himself on a mean bed, which was covered with a tattered coverlet, and asked for some refreshment.

All they could offer him was a little coarse bread, so black that the sight of it sickened his dainty taste, and some warm and foul water, which thirst forced him to drink. His friends meanwhile were in little less desperation than himself. They saw that no hope was left and that his place of concealment would soon be known, and entreated him to avoid a disgraceful death by taking his own life.

Nero promised to do so, but still sought reasons for delay. His funeral must be prepared for, he said, and bade them to dig a grave, to prepare wood for a funeral pile, and bring marble to cover his remains. Meanwhile he piteously bewailed his unhappy lot; sighed and shed tears copiously; and said, with a last impulse of vanity, "What a musician the world will lose!"

While he thus in cowardly procrastination delayed the inevitable end, a messenger, whom Phaon had ordered to bring news from Rome, arrived with papers. These Nero eagerly seized and read. He found himself dethroned, declared a public enemy, and condemned to suffer death with the rigor of ancient usage. Such was the decree of the senate, which hitherto had been his subservient slave.

"Ancient usage?" he asked. "What do they mean? What kind of death is that?"

"It is this," they told him. "Every traitor, by the law of the old republic, with his head fastened between two stakes, and his body stripped naked, was slowly flogged to death by the lictors' rods."

Dread of this terrible and ignominious punishment roused the trembling wretch to some semblance of courage. He produced two daggers, which he had brought with him, and tried their points. Then he replaced them in their scabbards, saying, "The fatal moment is not yet come."

Turning to Sporus, he said, "Sing the melancholy dirge, and offer the last obsequies to your friend." Then, rolling his eyes wildly around, he exclaimed, "Why will not some one of you kill himself, and teach me how to die?"

He paused a moment. No one seemed inclined adopt his suggestion. A flood of tears burst from his eyes. Starting up, he cried, in a tone of wild despair, "Nero, this is infamy; you linger in disgrace; this is no time for dejected passions; this moment calls for manly fortitude."

These words were hardly spoken when the sound of horses was heard advancing rapidly towards the house. Theatrical to the end, he repeated a line from Homer which the noise of hoofs recalled to his mind. At length, driven to desperation, he seized his dagger and stabbed himself in the throat,—but cowardice made the stroke too feeble. Epaphroditus now lent his aid, and the next thrust was a mortal one.

It was time. The horses were those of pursuers. The senate, informed of his probable place of refuge, had sent soldiers in haste to bring him back to Rome, there to suffer the punishment decreed. In a minute afterwards a centurion entered the room, and, seeing Nero prostrate and bleeding, ran to his aid, saying that he would bind the wound and save his life.

Nero looked up languidly, and said, in faint tones, "You come too late. Is this your fidelity?" In a moment more he expired.

In the words of Tacitus, "The ferocity of his nature was still visible in his countenance. His eyes fixed and glaring, and every feature swelled with warring passions, he looked more stern, more grim, more terrible than ever."

Nero was in his thirty-second year. He had reigned nearly fourteen years. Tacitus says of him, "The race of Cæsars ended with Nero; he was the last, and perhaps the worst, of that illustrious house."

The tidings of his death filled Rome with joy. Men ran wildly about the streets, their heads covered with liberty caps. Acclamations of gladness resounded in the Forum. Icelus, Galba's freedman and agent in Rome, whom Nero had thrown into prison, was released and took control of affairs. He ordered that Nero's body should be burned where he had died, and this was done so quickly and secretly that many would not believe that he was dead. The report got abroad that he had escaped to Asia or Egypt, and from time to time impostors appeared claiming to be Nero. The Parthians were deluded by one of these impostors and offered to defend his cause. Another made trouble in the Greek islands. Nero's profligate companions in Rome, who alone mourned his death, while affecting to believe him still alive raised a tomb to his memory, which for several years they annually dressed with the flowers of spring and summer. But the world at large rejoiced in its delivery from the rule of a monster of iniquity.