But those who were absent in the provinces, being neither under the immediate power of Nero nor partners in his excesses, did not endure with such complacence the shame he put upon the Roman name. Men like Galba and Vespasian heard with great indignation from scoffing foreigners how, at Rome, they had seen the emperor acting Orestes or even Canace on the stage. These men could not endure the thought of serving under a ruler who competed with a slaveborn pantomimist. Revolt flamed up among the legions in various parts of the Empire; the guards at Rome joined in it; and when Galba came, who had been proclaimed emperor, they gladly welcomed him. Rome was shaken in the very foundations of her constitutional ideals. The discovery of the possibility that an emperor could be created away from the city marked the entering of the wedge which was eventually to bring about the disintegration of the Empire. The legions had come clearly to realize that the gift of the Empire was in their hands. The Senate was henceforth supernumerary. The city was no longer to be viewed with that superstitious reverence which had made men deem nothing sacred or authoritative that had not issued therefrom; it was the centre, but no longer the source of Empire. It soon came to pass that "Roman" signified wide-spreading national inclusion rather than, as heretofore, racial exclusion; even a Jew might now claim to be a freeborn Roman citizen, though he had never seen the Capitol. In consequence of opposing claims to the succession, Italy was once more torn with civil strife, an experience from which she had been free ever since the days of the last Triumvirate. Within eighteen months three emperors were created and destroyed. Our story, however, does not deal with emperors or with the political history of Rome, except as it is necessary to refer to it as a background for, or an explanation of, the conduct of the women who are herein introduced. Women played no important part in the disturbances which shook the Empire after the death of Nero, and which thus differed from many of the previous revolutions in the State; yet it is entirely consistent with the plan of this work to mention the women who were connected with the principal actors.