It is the most striking instance upon record of a dramatic and extreme
vengeance overtaking extreme guilt; for, as Nero had exhausted the utmost
possibilities of crime, so it may be affirmed that he drank off the cup of
suffering to the very extremity of what his peculiar nature allowed. And
in no life of so short a duration, have there ever been crowded equal
extremities of gorgeous prosperity and abject infamy. It may be added, as
another striking illustration of the rapid mutability and revolutionary
excesses which belonged to what has been properly called the Roman
_stratocracy_ then disposing of the world, that within no very great
succession of weeks that same victorious rebel, the Emperor Galba, at
whose feet Nero had been self-immolated, was laid a murdered corpse in the
same identical cell which had witnessed the lingering agonies of his
unhappy victim. This was the act of an emancipated slave, anxious, by a
vindictive insult to the remains of one prince, to place on record his
gratitude to another. "So runs the world away!" And in this striking way
is retribution sometimes dispensed.
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