last of his race in the vault of the Domitii.(88) Nero must have had something of that charm which leads women in every age to forget faults, and even crimes in the men whom they have once loved. And the strange, lingering superstition, which disturbed the early Church, and which looked for his reappearance down to the eleventh century, could hardly have gathered around an utterly mean and mediocre character.(89) When Nero uttered the words “Qualis artifex pereo,”(90) he gave not only his own interpretation of his life, he also revealed one great secret of its ghastly failure. It may be admitted that Nero had a certain artistic enthusiasm, a real ambition to excel.(91) He painted with some skill, he composed verses not without a certain grace. In spite of serious natural defects, he took endless pains to acquire the technique of a singer. Far into the night he would sit in rapt enthusiasm listening to the effects of Terpnus, and trying to copy them.(92) His artistic tour in Greece, which lowered him so much in the eyes of the West, was really inspired by the passion to find a sympathetic audience which he could not find at Rome. And, in spite of his arrogance and vanity, he had a wholesome deference for the artistic judgment of Greece. Yet it is very striking that in the records of his reign, the most damning accusation is that he disgraced the purple by exhibitions on the stage. His songs to the lyre, his impersonation of the parturient Canace or the mad Hercules, did as much to cause his overthrow as his murders of Britannicus and Agrippina.(93) The stout Roman soldier and the Pythagorean apostle have the same scorn for the imperial charioteer and actor. A false literary ambition, born of a false system of education, was the bane of Roman culture for many ages. The dilettante artist on the throne in the first century had many a successor in the literary arts among the grand seigneurs of the fifth. They could play with their ingenious tricks of verse in sight of the Gothic camp-fires. He could contend for the wreath at Olympia when his faithful freedman was summoning him back by the news that the West was seething with revolt.(94)