It was a dazzling prize, offering frightful temptations both to the holder and to possible rivals and pretenders. The day on which a Nero or a Caligula awoke to all the possibilities of power was a fateful one. And Tacitus, with the instinct of the tragic artist, has painted the steady, fatal corruption of a prince’s character by the corroding influence of absolute and solitary sway. Of all the Caesars down to his time, the only one who changed for the better was the homely Vespasian. In Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero, some of this deterioration of character must be set down to the morbid strain in the Julio-Claudian line, with its hard and cruel pride, and its heritage of a tainted blood, of which Nero’s father knew the secret so well. Much was also due to the financial exhaustion which, in successive reigns, followed the most reckless waste. It would be difficult to say whether the emperors or their nobles were the most to blame for the example of spendthrift extravagance and insane luxury. Two generations before the foundation of the Empire, the passion for profusion had set in, which, according to Tacitus, raged unchecked till the accession of Vespasian.(174) Certainly, the man who would spend £3000 on a myrrhine vase, £4000 on a table of citrus-wood, or £40,000 on a richly wrought carpet from Babylon, had little to learn even from Nero.(175) Yet the example of an emperor must always be potent for good or evil. We have the testimony of Pliny and Claudian,(176) separated by an interval of three hundred years, that the world readily conforms its life to that of one man, if that man is head of the State. Nero’s youthful enthusiasm for declamation gave an immense impulse to the passion for rhetoric.(177) His enthusiasm for acting and music spread through all ranks, and the emperor’s catches were sung at wayside inns.(178) M. Aurelius made philosophy the mode, and the Stoic Emperor is responsible for some of the philosophic imposture which moved the withering scorn of Lucian. The Emperor’s favourite drug grew so popular that the price of it became almost prohibitory.(179) If the model of Vespasian’s homely habits had such an effect in reforming society, we may be sure that the evil example of his spendthrift predecessors did at least as much to deprave it.