The room in which they were sitting was one of the most private apartments of the Palace. It had been painted in the reign of Gaius with frescoes graceful and brilliant, but such as would now be regarded as proofs of an utterly depraved taste. As he glanced at the works of art with which the chamber was decorated, Otho thought, not without complacency, of the day when the prediction made to him by an astrologer should be fulfilled, and he too would be Emperor of Rome. He highly approved of frescoes such as these, though even Ovid and Propertius had complained of their corrupting tendency. Otho was now nearly twenty-three years old, and was a characteristic product of imperial civilisation. His face was smooth, for he had artificially prevented the growth of a beard. To hide his baldness, which he regarded as the most cruel wrong of the unjust gods, he wore a wig, so natural and close-fitting as scarcely to be recognisable, and this was arranged in front in the fashion which he set, and which Nero followed. Four rows of symmetrical curls half hid the narrow forehead. Those curls had cost his barber two hours’ labour that morning, and they were dyed with a Batavian pomade into the blonde colour which was the most admired. In figure Otho was small; his legs were bowed, and his feet ill-shaped, but his large eyes and beautiful mouth gave him a sweet and engaging, though effeminate, expression. Indeed, effeminacy was his main characteristic, and there was a touch of effeminacy even in the much belauded suicide to which his destiny was leading him. When he was a boy, his father was so disgusted by his ways that he flogged him like the lowest of his slaves. He was one of those creatures of perfumed baths, delicate languor, soft manners, and disordered appetites, who, in that age, so often took refuge from a depraved life in a voluntary death.[12] He was entirely impecunious, and was loaded with debts--a circumstance which he did not regard as any obstacle to a life of boundless extravagance. In order to get introduced to Nero he had the effrontery to make love to a plain and elderly freedwoman, who had some influence at Court. When he had once secured an introduction he became the ardent friend of Nero, and the intimate accomplice of his worst dissipations. Being six years older than the Emperor, and far more accomplished in vice, he exercised a spell which rapidly undermined the grave lessons of Burrus and Seneca. Precociously corrupt, serenely egotistical, cynical in dishonour, and gangrened to the depth of his soul by debauchery, Otho, though still a youth, had so completely got rid of the moral sense as to present to the world a spectacle of unruffled self-content. A radiant and sympathetic softness reigned smiling on his smooth and almost boyish face.