"At last," Nero murmured, "I am lodged like a man."

No doubt. Yet in a mirror he would have seen a bloated beast in a
flowered gown, the hair done up in a chignon, the skin covered
with eruptions, the eyes circled and yellow; a woman who had hours
when she imitated a virgin at bay, others when she was wife, still
others when she expected to be a mother, and that woman, a
senatorial patent of divinity aiding, was god--Apollo's peer,
imperator, chief of the army, pontifix maximus, master of the
world, with the incontestable right of life and death over every
being in the dominions.

It had taken the fresh-faced lad who blushed so readily, just
fourteen years to effect that change. Did he regret it? And what
should Nero regret? Nothing, perhaps, save that at the moment when
he declared himself to be lodged like a man, he had not killed
himself like one. But of that he was incapable. Had he known what
the future held, possibly he might have imitated that apotheosis
of vulgarity in which Sardanapalus eclipsed himself, but never
could he have died with the good breeding and philosophy of Cato,
for neither good breeding nor philosophy was in him. Nero killed
himself like a coward, yet that he did kill himself, in no matter
what fashion, is one of the few things that can be said in his
favor.

Those days differed from ours. There were circumstances in which
suicide was regarded as the simplest of duties. Nero did his duty,
but not until he was forced to it, and even then not until he had
been asked several times whether it was so hard to die. The empire
had wearied of him. In Neropolis his popularity had gone as