w could one endure to hear about,
let alone seeing, an emperor, an Augustus, listed on the program among the
contestants, training his voice, practicing certain songs, wearing long
hair on his head but with his chin shaven, throwing his toga over his
shoulder in the races, walking about with one or two attendants, eyeing
his adversaries suspiciously and ever and anon throwing out a word to them
in the midst of a boxing match; how he dreaded the directors of the games
and the wielders of the whip and spent money on all of them secretly to
avoid being shown up in his true colors and whipped; and how all that he
did to make himself victor in the citharoedic contest only contributed to
his defeat in the Contest of the Caesars? How find words to denounce the
wickedness of this proscription in which it was not [Footnote: [Greek: oi]
supplied by Reiske.] Sulla that bulletined the names of others, but Nero
bulletined his own name? What victory less deserves the name than that by
which one receives the olive, the laurel, the parsley, or the fir-tree
garland, and loses the political crown? And why should one bewail these
acts of his alone, seeing that he also by treading on the high-soled
buskins lowered himself from his eminence of power, and by hiding behind
the mask lost the dignity of his sovereignty to beg in the guise of a
runaway slave, to be led like a blind man, to conceive, to bear children,
to go mad [to drive a chariot], as he acted out time after time the story
of Oedipus, and of Thyestes, of Heracles and Alemeon, and of Orestes? The
masks he wore were sometimes made to resemble the characters and sometimes
had his own likeness. The women's masks were all fashioned to conform to
the features of Sabina [in order that though dead she might still move in
stately procession. All the situations that common actors simulate in
their acting he, too, would undertake to present, by speech, by action, by
being acted upon,--save only that] golden chains were used to bind him:
apparently it was not thought proper for a Roman emperor to be bound in
iron shackles.

[Sidenote:--10--] All this behavior, nevertheless, the soldiers and all
the rest saw, endured, and approved. They entitled him Pythian Victor,
Olympian Victor, National Victor, Absolute Victor, besides all the usual
expressions, and of course added to these names the honorific designations
belonging to his imperial office, so that every one of them had "Caesar"
and "Augus