[Sidenote:—­8—­] Nero though angry at him did not sail against him, nor yet against the Ethiopians or the Caspian Pylae, as he had intended. [He saw that the subjugation of these regions demanded time and labor and hoped that they would submit to him of their own accord:] and he sent spies to both places.  But he did cross over into Greece, not at all as Flamininus or Mummius or as Agrippa and Augustus his ancestors had done, but for the purpose of chariot racing, of playing and singing, of making proclamations, and of acting in tragedies.  Rome was not enough for him, nor Pompey’s theatre, nor the great hippodrome, but he desired also a foreign tour, in order to become, as he said, victor in all the four contests. [Footnote:  Literally “victor of the periodos.”  This was a name applied to an athlete who had conquered in the Pythian, Isthmian, Nemean and Olympian games.] And a multitude not only of Augustans but of other persons were taken with him, large enough, if it had been a hostile host, to have subdued both Parthians and all other nations.  But they were the kind you would have expected Nero’s soldiers to be, and the arms they carried were zithers and plectra, masks and buskins.  The victories Nero won were such as befitted that sort of army, and he overcame Terpnus and Diodorus and Pammenes, instead of Philip or Perseus or Antiochus.  It is probable that his purpose in forcing the Pammenes referred to, who had been in his prime in the reign of Gaius, to compete in spite of his age, was that he might overcome him and vent his dislike in abuse of his statues.

[Sidenote:  A.D. 67 (?)] [Sidenote:—­9—­] Had he done only this, he would have been the subject of ridicule.  So how could one endure to hear about, let alone seeing, an emperor, an Augustus, listed on the program among the contestants, training his voice, practicing certain songs, wearing long hair on his head but with his chin shaven, throwing his toga over his shoulder in the races, walking about with one or two attendants, eyeing his adversaries suspiciously and ever and anon throwing out a word to them in the midst of a boxing match; how he dreaded the directors of the games and the wielders of the whip and spent money on all of them secretly to avoid being shown up in his true colors and whipped; and how all that he did to make himself victor in the citharoedic contest only contributed to his defeat in the Contest of the Caesars?  How find words to denounce the wickedness of this proscription in which it was not [Footnote:  [Greek:  oi] supplied by Reiske.] Sulla that bulletined the names of others, but Nero bulletined his own name?  What victory less deserves the name than that by which one receives the olive, the laurel, the parsley, or the fir-tree garland, and loses the political crown?  And why should one bewail these acts of his alone, seeing that he also by treading on the high-soled buskins lowered himself from his eminence of power, and by hiding behind the mask lost the dignity of