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VICTOR OVER THE PUBLIC SERVITUDE 315
attendants round him, and paced np and down in a frenzy of
delirium, declaring that when the dawn came he would certainly
be slain. They persuaded him to lie down again, but
scarcely had he dropped into an uneasy sleep when it seemed
to him as though he saw the three Furies sweeping down
upon him with the blue snakes gleaming in their hair and
the torches shaken in their hands, while his mother, who
pointed them to him, shrieked aloud, Ho ' ! murderer of thy
'
mother ! no sleep henceforth for thee !
Leaping once more from that couch of agony, he sat mute,
and trembling in every limb, his clenched hands buried in his
hair, waiting in anguish the break of day. When the first
beam of dawn lit the east, it showed a youth whose pallid
features were haggard with agonies of fear.
If there had been a spark of nobleness in the Komau world,
the indignation of a people's moral sense might have sprung
to arms and smitten the tyrant while he was yet red-handed
from his crime. Nothing was farther from the general intention.
The universal desire was to 'skin and film the ulcerous
place ' with adulation and hypocrisy. Men, not naturally evil
or case-hardened, were carried away by the tide of complaisance
to the imperial murderer. As though to leave no chance
for any feelings of penitence to work, all classes began to
flood him with congratulations. The fears which at the moment
he half mistook for remorse vanished like the early
dew, for society seized upon the convention that Agrippina,
detected in a plot against the life of her son, had been justly
executed. The tribunes and centurions of the Praetorians,
Burrus at their head, came to Nero that morning, poured
their felicitations upon him, pressed his hands, expressed
their effusive joy that he had escaped from so sudden a peril
created by his mother's crime. His friends crowded to the
temples to thank the gods for his safety. There was scarcely
a town of Campania which did not express its joy by sending
deputations and offering victims. Distant provinces caught
the infection, and Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul surpassed
all the rest by the fulsome entreaty which they sent by their
ambassador, Julius Africanus, 'that Nero would endure his
'
felicity with fortitude !
Certainly it did not seem as if there
were much cause for fear ! In a few days Nero became an
adept at the counter-hypocrisy with which he feigned to