[Illustration:  FIG. 13.—­BUST OF SENECA.  Archeologische Zeitung.]

Perhaps this is the time to look for a little while at this Nero, whose name has deservedly passed into a byword for heartless bestiality.  In the year 64 he is 27 years of age, and has been seated on the throne for ten years.  Four years more are to elapse before he perishes with the cry, “What an artist the world is losing!” In his early years his vicious propensities, inherited from an abominable father, had been kept in check partly by his preceptor, the philosopher Seneca, and by Burrus, the commander of the Imperial Guards, partly by his domineering and furious-tempered mother, Agrippina, who seems to have so closely resembled the mother of Lord Byron.  But at this date he had got rid of both his tutors.  Burrus was dead, probably by poison, and Seneca was in forced retirement.  The emperor had also caused his own mother to be murdered.  Poisoning, strangling, drowning, or a command—­explicit or implied—­to depart this life, were his ways of shaking off any incubus upon a free indulgence of his will.  His follies and vices had revealed themselves from the first, and had gone to outrageous lengths, but now he is entirely unhampered in exhibiting them.

[Illustration:  Photo—­Mansell & Co.  FIG. 14—­BUST OF AGRIPPINA, MOTHER OF NERO.]

Educated slightly in philosophy, but better in music and letters, he could speak, like others of his day, Greek as well as his native Latin.  His aim was to be an “artist,” but if the want of balance which too often goes with what is called the “artistic temperament” ever manifested itself in its worst form, it was in Nero.  Apart from his passion for music and verse, he developed an early mania for horse-racing, and when he was caught talking in school—­where such conversation was forbidden—­about a charioteer who had fallen out of his chariot and been dragged along the ground, he explained that he was discussing the passage in Homer where Achilles drags the body of Hector round the walls of Troy.  In after life he carried both forms of mania to amazing lengths.  The highest form of music was then represented by singing to the harp.  Nero’s ambition was no less than to compete with the champion minstrels of the world.  As he remarked, “music is not music unless it is heard,” and he decided to make public appearances upon the stage like any professional.  Whenever he did so, a number of energetic youths, salaried for the purpose, were distributed among the audience as claqueurs—­the words actually used for them being perhaps translatable as “boomers” or “rattlers.”  He acted parts in plays—­a proceeding which would correspond to an appearance in opera—­and made a peregrination through Greece and back by way of Naples as an exponent of the art of singing to the harp.  While upon this tour, whenever he was performing in the theatre, the doors were shut, and no one might leave the building for any reason whatever.  “Many,”