At last, while his companions one and all urged him to save himself as soon as possible from the indignities that threatened him, he bade them dig a grave in his presence, proportioned to the size of his own person, collect any bits of marble that could be found, and at the same time bring water and wood for presently disposing of his body.° As each of these things was done, he wept and said again and again: “ What an artist the world is losing !”” While he hesitated, a letter was brought to Phaon by one of his couriers. Nero snatching it from his hand read that he had been pronounced a public enemy by the senate, and that they were seeking him to punish him in the ancient fashion;4 and he asked what manner of punishment that was. When he learned that the criminal was stripped, fastened by the neck in a fork® and then beaten to death with rods, in mortal terror he seized two daggers which he had brought with him, and then, after trying the point of each, put them up again, pleading that the fated hour had not yet come. Now he would beg Sporus to begin to lament and wail, and now entreat someone to help him take his life by setting him the example; anon he reproached himself for his cowardice in such words as these: “ To live is a scandal and shame—this does not become Nero, does not become him—one should be resolute at such times—come, rouse thyself!’” And now the horsemen were at hand who had orders to take him off alive. When he heard them, he quavered: “ Hark, now strikes on my ear the trampling of swift-footed coursers!”’ ® and drove a dagger into his throat, aided Epaphroditus, his private secretary.© He was but dead when a centurion rushed in, and by all as he placed a cloak to the wound, pretending that he had come to aid him, Nero merely gasped: “Too late !”’ and “ This is fidelity!’’ With these words he was gone, with eyes so set and starting from their sockets that all who saw him shuddered with horror. First and beyond all else he had forced from his companions a promise to let no one have his head, but to contrive in some way that he be buried unmutilated. And this was granted by Icelus, Galba’s freedman,4 who had shortly before been released from the bondage to which he was consigned at the beginning of the revolt.