Art has made them our contemporaries.
They are as near to us as Pius VII. and Napoleon. I never drive out
of the old Nomentan Gate without remembering the ghastly flight of
Nero,--his recognition there by an old centurion,--his damp, drear
hiding-place underground, where, shuddering and quoting Greek, he waited
for his executioners,--and his subsequent terrible and cowardly death,
as narrated by Tacitus and Suetonius; and it seems nearer to me, more
vivid, and more actual, than the death of Rossi in the court of the
Cancelleria. I never drive by the Caesars' palaces, without recalling
the ghastly jest of Tiberius, when he sent for some fifteen of the
Senators at dead of night and commanded their presence; and when they,
trembling with fear, and expecting nothing less than that their heads
were all to fall, had been kept waiting for an hour, the door opened,
and he, nearly naked, appeared with a fiddle in his hand, and, after
fiddling and dancing to his quaking audience for an hour, dismissed them
to their homes uninjured. The air seems to keep a sort of spiritual
scent or trail of these old deeds, and to make them more real here than
elsewhere.
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