Then he tried yet further forms of magic and yet darker rites of propitiation to the infernal powers, in which it was whispered that human blood--the blood of murdered infants--formed part of the instruments of sorcery. But he could learn no secrets of the future; he could evoke no powers who could ward away that white menacing spectre which gleamed upon him if at any moment he found himself alone in the hours of night. Nero became a haunted man. The whole earth seemed to him to be ‘made of glass’ to reveal his turpitude. He knew in his miserable heart that the very street boys of Rome--the ragged urchins of the slaves and gladiators--were aware of the crime which he had committed. Kind friends kept him informed, under pretence of officious indignation, that one night an infant had been found exposed in the Forum with a scrap of parchment round its neck, on which was written, ‘_I expose you, lest you should murder your mother_;’ and that, another night, a sack had been hung round the neck of his statue as though to threaten him with the old weird punishment of parricides. Once, when he was looking on at one of the rude plays known as Atellane, the actor Datus had to pronounce the line, ‘Good health to you, father; good health to you, mother;’ and, with the swift inimitable gestures of which the quick Italian people never missed the significance, he managed to indicate Claudius dying of poison and Agrippina swimming for her life. The populace roared out its applause at an illusion so managed that it could hardly be resented; and once again, when coming to the line, ‘Death drags you by the foot.’ Datus indicated Nero’s hatred to the Senate by pointing significantly to Nero at the word ‘_death_’ and to the senatorial seats as he emphasized the word ‘_you_.’ But Nero was liable to insults still more direct. Could he not read with his own eyes the _graffito_ scrawled upon every blank space of wall in Rome: ‘_Nero, Orestes, Alcmæon, matricidæ_’? He could not detect or punish these anonymous scrawlers, but he would have liked to punish men of rank, whom he well knew to have written stinging satires against him, branding him with every kind of infamy. Two resources alone were adequate to dissipate the terrors of his conscience--the intoxication of promiscuous applause and the self-abandonment to a sensuality which grew ever more shameless as the restraints of Agrippina’s authority and Seneca’s influence were removed.