At that moment it was that there dawned at Rome the first gray morning-light of the new civilization.

At that moment it was that that short scene, in that one chamber, contrasted the two as clearly as they can be contrasted even in long centuries.

There is one man, the emperor, who is a precise type, an exact representative, of the old.  That man is brought face to face with another who is a precise type, an exact representative, of the new.

Only look at them as they stand there!  The man who best illustrates the old civilization owes to it the most careful nurture.  From his childhood he has been its petted darling.  Its principal is concentration under one head.  He is that head.  When he is a child, men know he will be emperor of the world.  The wise men of the world teach him; the poets of the world flatter him; the princes of the world bow to him.  He is trained in all elegant accomplishments; he is led forward through a graceful, luxurious society.  His bearing is that of an emperor; his face is the face of fine physical beauty.  Imagine for yourself the sensual countenance of a young Bacchus, beautiful as Milton’s devils; imagine him clad in splendor before which even English luxury is mean; arrayed in jewels, to which even Eastern pomp is tinsel; imagine an expression of tired hate, of low, brutal lust, hanging on those exquisite licentious features, and you have before you the type of Roman civilization.  It is the boy just budding into manhood, whom later times will name as the lowest embodiment of meanness and cruelty!  You are looking upon Nero!

Not only is this man an exact type of the ancient civilization, its central power, its outside beauty, but the precise time of this sketch of ours is the exact climax of the moral results of the ancient civilization.  We are to look at Nero just when he has returned to Rome from a Southern journey.[I] That journey had one object, which succeeded.  To his after-life it gives one memory, which never dies.  He has travelled to his beautiful country palace, that he might kill his mother!

We can picture to ourselves Agrippina, by knowing that she was Nero’s mother, and our picture will not fail in one feature.  She has all the beauty of sense, all the attraction of passion.  Indeed, she is the Empress of Rome, because she is queen of beauty—­and of lust.  She is most beautiful among the beautiful of Rome; but what is that beauty of feature in a state of whose matrons not one is virtuous, of whose daughters not one is chaste?  It is the beauty of sense alone, fit adornment of that external grandeur, of that old society.

In the infancy of her son, this beautiful Agrippina consulted a troop of fortune-tellers as to his fate; and they told her that he would live to be Emperor of Rome, and to kill his mother.  With all the ecstasy of a mother’s pride fused so strangely with all the excess of an ambitious woman’s love of power, she cried in answer, “He may kill me, if only he rules Rome!"[J]