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1 See Nisard : Poetes de la Decadence, i. 91 .
NERO AND HIS COMPANIONS 55
Otho was now nearly twenty-three years old, and was a
characteristic product of imperial civilisation. His face was
smooth, for he had artificially prevented the growth of a beard.
To hide his baldness, which he regarded as the most cruel
wrong of the unjust gods, he wore a wig, so natural and closefitting
as scarcely to be recognisable, and this was arranged in
front in the fashion which he set, and which Nero followed.
Four rows of symmetrical curls half hid the narrow forehead.
Those curls had cost his barber two hours' labour that morning,
and they were dyed with a Batavian pomade into the blonde
colour which was the most admired. In figure Otho was
small; his legs were bowed, and his feet ill-shaped, but his
large eyes and beautiful mouth gave him a sweet and engaging,
though effeminate, expression. Indeed, effeminacy was his main
characteristic, and there was a touch of effeminacy even in the
much belauded suicide to which his destiny was leading him.
When he was a boy, his father was so disgusted by his ways
that he flogged him like the lowest of his slaves. He was one
of those creatures of perfumed baths, delicate languor, soft
manners, and disordered appetites, who, in that age, so often
took refuge from a depraved life in a voluntary death. 1 He
was entirely impecunious, and was loaded with debts a circumstance
which he did not regard as any obstacle to a life
of boundless extravagance. In order to get introduced to Nero
he had the effrontery to make love to a plain and elderly freedwoman,
who had some influence at Court. When he had once
secured an introduction he became the ardent friend of Nero,
and the intimate accomplice of his worst dissipations. Being
six years older than the Emperor, and far more accomplished
in vice, he exercised a spell which rapidly undermined the
grave lessons of Burrus and Seneca. Precociously corrupt,
serenely egotistical, cynical in dishonour, and gangrened to the
depth of his soul by debauchery, Otho, though still a youth,
had so completely got rid of the moral sense as to present to
the world a spectacle of unruffled self-content. A radiant and
sympathetic softness reigned smiling on his smooth and almost
boyish face.
By the side of Otho lounged another youth, whose name
was Tullius Senecio. He was wealthy and reckless, and he
had made himself a leader of fashion among the young Eoman