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566 DARKNESS AND DAWN
to insult the murdered remains of Lollia Paulina, and of the
sad and innocent Octavia ! His one dread was that his head
should be similarly insulted ;
his one main entreaty to the
companions of his flight had been that he should be burnt
whole, and his head not be given to his enemies.
Fairer and kinder measure was dealt to him than he had dealt
to others. Among those who hurried to the villa was Icelus,
the powerful freedman of his rival Galba. Nero had thrown
him into prison at the news of Galba's revolt, but at Nero's
flight he had been set free. It was not the usual way with
the Eomans to make war with the dead, and Icelus gave
permission that the body should be burnt. It was consumed
in the white robe broidered with gold which he
had worn at his ill-omened sacrifice on the first of January.
No hindrance was put in the way of his funeral. Two
women who had nursed his infancy, and Acte, who had
loved him in his youth, wept over his bier. No tear was
shed besides. They laid his ashes in a porphyry sarcophagus,
over which was raised an altar of the white marble of
Luna, surrounded by a Thasian balustrade.
He was but thirty-one when he died ;
and he had crowded
all that colossal criminality, all that mean rascality, all that
insane degradation, extravagance, and lust, into a reign of
fourteen years
!
So great was the exultation over his fall of the people
whom he had pampered, that the whole body of plebeians
appeared in the streets wearing hats. A slave could only
wear a hat after he had been manumitted, and the people
wished to show that by his death they had been emancipated
from slavery. Yet he and they had mutually corrupted
each other, and the vicious populace had reacted on
the vicious ruler. Nor was it long before those to whom
vice was dear began to show their sympathy by adorning
his tomb with spring and summer flowers. Every base and
foul ruler who succeeded him lascivious Otho, gluttonous
Vitellius, savage Domitian, womanish Elagabalus, brutal
Commodus all who disgraced the name of Eoman and
of man made him their ideal and their hero.
And since so very few had witnessed his death, the multitude
in every land persisted in the belief that another body
and not his had been burnt ;
that he had taken refuge among