At that time the ingenuous lad had disappeared. The cub was full-
grown. Besides, he had tasted blood. Octavia, who with her
brother, Britannicus, and her sister, Antonia, had been his
playmates; who was almost his own sister; whose earliest memories
interlinked with his, and who had become his wife, had been put to
death; not that she had failed to please, but because a lady,
Sabina Poppoea, who, Tacitus says, lacked nothing except virtue,
had declined to be his mistress. At the time Sabina was married.
But divorce was easy. Sabina got one at the bar; Nero with the
axe. The twain were then united. Nero seems to have loved her
greatly, a fact, as Suetonius puts it, which did not prevent him
from kicking her to death. Already he had poisoned Britannicus,
and with Octavia decapitated and Agrippina gone, of the imperial
house there remained but Antonia and himself. The latter he
invited to marry him; she declined. He invited her to die. He was
then alone, the last of his race. Monsters never engender. A
thinker who passed that way thought him right to have killed his
mother; her crime was in giving him birth.

Therewith he was popular; more so even than Caligula, who was a
poet, and as such apart from the crowd, while Nero was frankly
canaille--well-meaning at that--which Caligula never was. During
the early years of his reign he could not do good enough. The
gladiators were not permitted to die; he would have no shedding of
blood; the smell of it was distasteful. He would listen to no
denunciations; when a decree of death was brought to him to sign,
he regretted that he knew how to write. Rome had never seen a
gentler prince, nor yet one more splendidly lavish. The people had
not only the necessities of life, but the luxuries, the
superfluities, too. For days and days in the Forum there was an