At the beginning of the fourth act, when the freedman Milichus discloses Piso’s conspiracy, Nero’s trepidation is well depicted.  It is curious that among the conspirators the author should not have introduced the dauntless woman, Epicharis, who refused under the most cruel tortures to betray the names of her accomplices, and after biting out her tongue died from the sufferings that she had endured on the rack.  “There,” as mad Hieronymo said, “you could show a passion.”  Even Tacitus, who upbraids the other conspirators with pusillanimity, marks his admiration of this noble woman.  No reader will quarrel with the playwright if he has thought fit to paint the conspirators in brighter colours than the historian had done.  When Scevinus is speaking we seem to be listening to the voice of Shakespeare’s Cassius:  witness the exhortation to Piso,—­

    “O Piso thinke,
    Thinke on that day when in the Parthian fields
    Thou cryedst to th’flying Legions to turne
    And looke Death in the face; he was not grim,
    But faire and lovely when he came in armes.”

The character of Piso, for whom Tacitus shows such undisguised contempt, is drawn with kindliness and sympathy.  Seneca, too, who meets with grudging praise from the stern historian, stands out ennobled in the play.  His bearing in the presence of death is admirably dignified; and the polite philosopher, whose words were so faultless and whose deeds were so faulty, could hardly have improved upon the chaste diction of the farewell address assigned him by the playwright.

While Seneca’s grave wise words are still ringing in our ears we are called to watch a leave-taking of a different kind.  No reader of the Annals can ever forget the strange description of the end of Petronius;—­how the man whose whole life had “gone, like a revel, by” neither faltered, when he heard his doom pronounced, nor changed a whit his wonted gaiety; but dying, as he had lived, in abandoned luxury, sent under seal to the emperor, in lieu of flatteries, the unblushing record of their common vices.  The obscure playwright is no less impressive than the world-renowned historian.  While Antonius and Enanthe are picturing to themselves the consternation into which Petronius will be thrown by the emperor’s edict, the object of their commiseration presents himself.  Briefly dismissing the centurion, he turns with kindling cheek to his scared mistress—­“Come, let us drink and dash the posts with wine!” Then he discourses on the blessings of death; he begins in a semi-ironical vein, but soon, forgetful of his auditors, is borne away on the wings of ecstacy.  The intense realism of the writing is appalling.  He speaks as a “prophet new inspired,” and we listen in wonderment and awe.  The language is amazingly strong and rich, and the imagination gorgeous.