There now dawned on Rome some consciousness of the price that the Empire was paying for the stupendous folly it had so long applauded. While the treasury was being exhausted in entertainments that all could enjoy, the murmuring was confined to the sober few. From the moment when this colossal symbol of Nero’s selfishness towered above the city, the murmurs became audible and were multiplied. Nero, alarmed at the sullen looks and the vague reports of plots, went down angrily to the coast. Then a slave brought a definite accusation of conspiracy against his master, and the stream of blood began to flow. It is an unhappy fact, and one that confirms the darker view of Poppæa’s character, that almost the only detail related of her in the chronicles, after the death of her child, is that she was one of the council of three who directed this horrible series of executions. Nero would not trust the ordinary procedure of Roman justice. With Poppæa and Tigellinus as associate-judges, he himself examined, or endorsed, every charge that cupidity or malignity brought to the palace. Rome was reddened for weeks with torture, murder, and suicide. Students of the decay of Rome have, perhaps, not sufficiently appreciated the effect of this periodic effusion of the best blood in the city. In the earlier wars, both civil and foreign, the good and the base alike had fallen. In these inquisitions for conspiracy, which fill Rome with mourning time after time from the death of Octavian to the accession of Trajan, it is chiefly the men and women of honour who suffer. They constitute a natural selection of the cowardly and the sycophantic. The city “teemed with funerals,” in the terse phrase of Tacitus, and the gatherings of its citizens were black with mourning. Large numbers of officers and patricians were executed or driven to suicide, and their children were scourged or banished to the provinces. Seneca paid the penalty of his tardy outspokenness, and his admirable end sustains our trust that his character may, in spite of our unconquerable hesitations, have been not inconsistent with his high creed. He and his wife, who nobly asked permission to quit the world with him, had their veins opened, and Seneca passed into the silence with quiet dignity; his wife was, to her regret, recalled to life by the soldiers.