click to read pdf file - The Preterist Archive

404 DARKNESS AND DAWN
been swept forever out of her path. There lay the fair form,
with its long dark hair and girlish beauty, and more beautiful
than in life, for a look as of rapturous surprise had lit up her
pale features. It availed not. The head was struck off by
the centurion, and he carried to Koine the ghastly relic, at
once to claim his reward, and to glut the eyes of Poppsea with
the sight of '
death made proud by pure and princely beauty.'
And for this crime the slavish and degraded Senate vowed
gifts to the temples In those days every unjust banishment,
every judicial murder inflicted by the Emperor, was
!
the signal for a fresh outburst of infamous adulation. The
thanksgivings to the gods, which had once been the signs of
public prosperity, became the certain memorials of private
infamy and public disaster.