And it struck them with deeper horror to see that the antichrist, so far from being abhorred, was generally popular. He was popular because he presented to the degraded populace their own image and similitude. The frog-like unclean spirits which proceeded, as it were, out of his mouth were potent with these dwellers in an atmosphere of pestilence. They had lost all love for freedom and nobleness; they cared only for doles and excitement. Even when the infamies of a Petronius had been superseded by the murderous orgies of Tigellinus, Nero was still everywhere welcomed with shouts as a god on earth and saluted on all coins as Apollo, as Hercules, as "the savior of the world." The poets still assured him that there was no deity in heaven who would not think it an honor to concede to him his prerogatives; that if he did not place himself well in the centre of Olympus, the equilibrium of the universe would be destroyed. Victims were slain along his path, and altars raised for him--for this wretch, whom an honest slave could not but despise and loathe--as though he was too great for mere human honors. Nay, more, he found adorers and imitators of his execrable example--an Otho, a Vitellius, a Domitian, a Commodus, a Caracalla, a Heliogabalus--to poison the air of the world. The lusts and hungers and furies of the world lamented him, and cherished his memory, and longed for his return. And yet, though all bad men--who were the majority--admired and even loved him, he died the death of a dog. Tremendous as was the power of imperialism, the Romans often treated their individual emperors as Nero himself treated the Syrian goddess, whose image he first worshipped with awful veneration and then subjected to the most grotesque indignities, for retribution did not linger, and the vengeance fell at once on the guilty Emperor and the guilty city. "Careless _seems_ the Great Avenger: History's pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt false systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne, Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own."[36]