Fire is a perfect poet.  No designer ever imagined the surprises it creates, and when, at the end of the week, three-fourths of the city was in ruins, the beauty that reigned there must have been sublime.  That it inspired Nero is presumable.  The palace on the Palatine, which Tiberius embellished and Caligula enlarged, had gone; in its place rose another, aflame with gold.  Before it Neropolis extended, a city of triumphal arches, enchanted temples, royal dwellings, shimmering porticoes, glittering roofs, and wide, hospitable streets.  It was fair to the eye, purely Greek; and on its heart, from the Circus Maximus to the Forum’s edge, the new and gigantic palace shone.  Before it was a lake, a part of which Vespasian drained and replaced with an amphitheatre that covered eight acres.  About that lake were separate edifices that formed a city in themselves; between them and the palace, a statue of Nero in gold and silver mounted precipitately a hundred and twenty feet—­a statue which it took twenty-four elephants to move.  About it were green savannahs, forest reaches, the call of bird and deer, while in the distance, fronted by a stretch of columns a mile in length, the palace stood—­a palace so ineffably charming that on the day of reckoning may it outbalance a few of his sins.  Even the cellars were frescoed.  The baths were quite comfortable; you had waters salt or sulphurous at will.  The dining halls had ivory ceilings from which flowers fell, and wainscots that changed at each service.  The walls were alive with the glisten of gems, with marbles rarer than jewels.  In one hall was a dome of sapphire, a floor of malachite, crystal columns and red-gold walls.

“At last,” Nero murmured, “I am lodged like a man.”

No doubt.  Yet in a mirror he would have seen a bloated beast in a flowered gown, the hair done up in a chignon, the skin covered with eruptions, the eyes circled and yellow; a woman who had hours when she imitated a virgin at bay, others when she was wife, still others when she expected to be a mother, and that woman, a senatorial patent of divinity aiding, was god—­Apollo’s peer, imperator, chief of the army, pontifix maximus, master of the world, with the incontestable right of life and death over every being in the dominions.

It had taken the fresh-faced lad who blushed so readily, just fourteen years to effect that change.  Did he regret it?  And what should Nero regret?  Nothing, perhaps, save that at the moment when he declared himself to be lodged like a man, he had not killed himself like one.  But of that he was incapable.  Had he known what the future held, possibly he might have imitated that apotheosis of vulgarity in which Sardanapalus eclipsed himself, but never could he have died with the good breeding and philosophy of Cato, for neither good breeding nor philosophy was in him.  Nero killed himself like a coward, yet that he did kill himself, in no matter what fashion, is one of the few things that can be said in his favor.