Such was the too memorable tragedy which closed for ever the brilliant
line of the Julian family, and translated the august title of Caesar from
its original purpose as a proper name to that of an official designation.
It is the most striking instance upon record of a dramatic and extreme
vengeance overtaking extreme guilt; for, as Nero had exhausted the utmost
possibilities of crime, so it may be affirmed that he drank off the cup of
suffering to the very extremity of what his peculiar nature allowed. And
in no life of so short a duration, have there ever been crowded equal
extremities of gorgeous prosperity and abject infamy. It may be added, as
another striking illustration of the rapid mutability and revolutionary
excesses which belonged to what has been properly called the Roman
_stratocracy_ then disposing of the world, that within no very great
succession of weeks that same victorious rebel, the Emperor Galba, at
whose feet Nero had been self-immolated, was laid a murdered corpse in the
same identical cell which had witnessed the lingering agonies of his
unhappy victim. This was the act of an emancipated slave, anxious, by a
vindictive insult to the remains of one prince, to place on record his
gratitude to another. "So runs the world away!" And in this striking way
is retribution sometimes dispensed.

In the sixth Caesar terminated the Julian line. The three next princes in
the succession were personally uninteresting; and, with a slight reserve
in favor of Otho, whose motives for committing suicide (if truly reported)
argue great nobility of mind, [Footnote: We may add that the unexampled
public grief which followed the death of Otho, exceeding even that which
followed the death of Germanicus, and causing several officers to commit
suicide, implies some remarkable goodness in this Prince, and a very
unusual power of conciliating attachment.] were even brutal in the tenor
of their lives and monstrous; besides that the extreme brevity of their
several reigns (all three, taken conjunctly, having held the supreme power