says the memoir-writer, “got so tired of listening and praising that they jumped down from the wall, or pretended to be dead, so as to get carried out.”  Naturally he always won the prize, and, on his side, it should be remarked that he honestly believed he had earned it.  He practised assiduously, took hard physical training, regulated his diet for the cultivation of his voice, which was not naturally of the best, and probably became not at all a bad amateur.  His monstrous self-conceit did the rest.  Besides singing to the harp, he was prepared to perform upon the flute and the bagpipes, and to give a dance afterwards.  All this, of course, was undignified and ridiculous, but it was scarcely tyranny.  Doubtless there was sufficient suffering among the audience, but that cruelty was hardly deliberate.  In the Roman noble, whose ideal of behaviour included dignity and gravity, these public appearances perhaps often aroused more indignation and scorn than did his sensual vices.  The same contempt was often evoked by other proceedings of a similar nature.  His insatiable fondness for horse-racing, or rather chariot-racing, induced him to appear also as a charioteer.  First he practised in his extensive private park or gardens, which were situated across the Tiber on the ground now approximately occupied by St. Peter’s and the Vatican.  When he appeared at the Olympic games driving a team of ten horses, he was thrown out of the car, and had to be lifted into it again.  Though he was eventually compelled to abandon the race, he was, of course, crowned victor all the same.  He dabbled also in painting and modelling.

We must not dwell too long upon his eccentricities.  One might describe how in his earlier years he often put on mufti and roamed the streets at night with a few choice Mohawks, broke into shops, and insulted respectable citizens, throwing them into the drains if they resisted; how, being unrecognized, he once received a sound thrashing from a person of the senatorial order, and was thereafter attended on such occasions by police following at a distance.  One might describe his dicing at L3 or L4 a pip, or his banquets, at one of which he paid as much as L30,000 for roses from Alexandria.  After the great conflagration which swept over a large part of Rome in this very year 64 he began to build his enormous Golden House, in which stood a colossal effigy of himself 120 feet high, and in which the circuit of the colonnade made three Roman miles.  Whether he deliberately set fire to the city in order to make room for this stupendous palace is open to doubt.  It was naturally believed at the time, and, in order to divert suspicion from himself, he turned it upon those persons for whom the Roman populace had at that moment the greatest contempt, because, as the historian puts it, of their pestilent superstition and of a profound suspicion that they harboured a “hatred of the human race.”  These were the new sect of the Christians, and with