Nero, anxious to restore his waning popularity with the crowd, and to divert the strange suspicion which had fixed upon him as the incendiary of the great fire, was determined that the games should surpass any former exhibition of the like kind in the number of victims provided, and in the refined cruelty of the awful punishment to which the sufferers were condemned. He had in good truth an array of victims for his ghastly exhibition such as had never been seen before. A like exhibition indeed was never repeated; the hideousness of it positively shocking the Roman populace, cruel though they were, and passionately devoted to scenic representations which included death and torture, crime and shame. Numbers of these first Christian martyrs were simply exposed to the beasts; others clothed in skins were hunted down by fierce wild dogs; others were forced to play a part in infamous dramas, which ever closed with the death of the victims in pain and agony. But the closing scene was the most shocking. As the night fell on the great show, as a novel delight for the populace, the Roman people being especially charmed with brilliant and striking illuminations, the outer ring of the vast arena was encircled with crosses on which a certain number of Christians were bound, impaled, or nailed. The condemned were clothed in tunics steeped in pitch and in other inflammable matter, and then, horrible to relate, the crucified and impaled were set on fire, and in the lurid light of these ghastly living torches the famous chariot races, in which the wicked Emperor took a part, were run. But _this_ was never repeated; as we have just stated, the sight of the living flambeaux, the protracted agony of the victims, was too dreadful even for that debased and hardened Roman crowd of heedless cruel spectators; the illuminations of Nero’s show were never forgotten; they remained an awful memory, but only a memory, even in Rome! There is good reason to suppose that one of the lookers on at the games of that long day and sombre evening in the gardens of the Vatican Hill was Seneca, the famous Stoic philosopher, once the tutor and afterwards for a time the minister of Nero. Seneca had retired from public life, and in two of his letters written during his retirement to his sick and suffering friend Lucilius, encouraging him to bear his distressing malady with brave patience, reminds him of the tortures which were now and again inflicted on the condemned; in vivid language picturing the fire, the chains, the worrying of wild beasts, the prison horrors, the cross, the tunic steeped in pitch, the rack, the red-hot irons placed on the quivering flesh. What, he asks his friend, are _your_ sufferings compared with sufferings caused by these tortures? And yet, he adds, his eyes had seen these things endured; from the sufferer no groan was heard--no cry for mercy--nay, in the midst of all he had seen the bravely patient victims smile!