As before, these terrible deeds were mingled with the most splendid and the most licentious entertainments. Noble dames of the highest rank wrestled and fought in the amphitheatre before the frivolous crowds; the city abounded in schools where the nobility learned to ape the Emperor’s folly, and contribute to the gaiety of Rome with the flute, the zither, or the dance. Nero conceived a new idea, and pursued it with zeal. He would contest the crown with the artists of Greece. Poppæa saw him training in the palace, lying for hours with heavy plates of lead on his chest, restricting himself to a diet of leeks and oil. She saw him exhibit his skill in the theatre, lifting up his blotched and swollen body, in extraordinary contortions, on his thin legs, as he strained after the high notes. Woe to the man who openly laughed, or who excelled him! One of his masters was put to death because Nero perceived that he could not equal the man. At last his training was complete, and Rome sighed with relief as the thousand carts, drawn by silver-shod mules, and the five thousand youths of the Augustan band, set out for the coast. They gratified Naples with a show as they passed through. For several days Nero kept the amazed citizens in the theatre, and took his meals in the orchestra, so as to lose no time. Then came the inevitable epilepsy; and it was announced that Nero, perceiving the grief of his subjects at the prospect of his departure, had postponed the Grecian tour. On his return to comparative health, and to Rome, he once more kept the citizens agog with alternate bursts of frantic dissipation and sanguinary melancholy. From the death of her child until her own violent end, two years later, Poppæa appears very little in the chronicles; but, as we shall see that, willing or unwilling, she supported her husband in his bloody crimes, we may assume that she joined him in his less criminal orgies. One instance will suffice. He ordered that a banquet should be given on a raft, on the large sheet of water known as Lake Agrippa. When the citizens crowded to the shore on the appointed evening, they found the great raft towed by vessels plated with ivory and gold, manned by youths who had won distinction in infamy. Round the shore taverns, brothels, and dining-rooms had been erected. And when the night fell, and the beautiful scene was lit by the light of innumerable torches, the public found that women of the highest rank were no less accessible to them than prostitutes in the houses by the lake, and the slave was at liberty to embrace his mistress under the eye of her husband. Nero even outdistanced Caligula in the Imperial teaching of vice. In the garb of a bride, he went through the religious ceremony of marriage with a man of base character, named Pythagoras. He had nude children fastened to stakes, and rushed upon them fittingly clad in the skin of a wild beast. And round the frontiers of that vast Empire, which the strength and