Among the amusements which Otho had provided was a ventriloquist, who took off all the chief lawyers of the day in a fashion first set by Mutus, in the reign of Tiberius. But the jaded, rose-crowned guests found that the evening was beginning to drag, and then they took to gambling. Nero caught the epidemic of extravagance, and that night he bet four hundred sesterces, not on each cast only, but on each _point_ of the dice. It was understood that, though the supper and its concomitant orgies were prolonged for hours, there was to be no deliberate drunkenness. Claudius had habitually indulged in a voracity which, on one occasion, had made him turn aside from his own judgment-seat to intrude himself as a guest at one of the celebrated banquets of the Salian priests, of which the appetising smell had reached him from the Temple of Mars. But by Otho and Petronius such forms of animalism were condemned as betraying a want of æsthetic breeding, and they sought to stimulate the lassitude of satiety by other forms of indulgence. That night they proposed to initiate Nero into a new sensation, by persuading him to join the roysterers who, like the Mohawks in the reign of Queen Anne, went about the streets insulting sober citizens, breaking open shops, and doing all the damage and mischief in their power. It was this which made that evening memorable in Nero’s reign, because it was the first instance of a folly which filled genuine Romans with anger and disdain. But before we touch on these adventures, another incident must be mentioned, which produced a far deeper effect upon the annals of the world. It was on the evening of that supper that Nero first saw Poppæa Sabina. Poppæa Sabina, though before her marriage to Otho she had been married to Rufius Crispinus, the Prætorian Præfect of Claudius, and had been the mother of a boy, still retained the youthful and enchanting loveliness which became an Empire’s curse. She was a bride well suited in all respects to the effeminate and reckless Otho. If he paid priceless sums for the perruque which no one could distinguish from his natural hair, and used only the costliest silver mirrors, she equalled his absurdities by having her mules shod with gold, and by keeping five hundred she-asses to supply the milk in which she bathed her entire person, with the object of keeping her beautiful complexion in all its softness of hue and contour. And, when she travelled, the hot sunbeams were never allowed to embrown her cheeks, which she entirely covered with a fine and fragrant unguent.