ce, and fight for his life.
Desperate as such an undertaking might be, no other alternative,
they said, was now left to him. But all was of no avail. The
conspirators could not arouse him to action. They were obliged to
retire and leave him to his fate. He opened the veins in his arm,
and bled to death while the soldiers whom Nero had sent were
breaking into his house to arrest him.

Being thus deprived of their leader, the conspirators gave up all
hope of effecting the revolution, and thought only of the means of
screening themselves from Nero's vengeance.

In the mean time, Epicharis had so far recovered during the night,
that on the following morning it was determined to bring her again
to the torture. She was utterly helpless,--her limbs having been
broken by the execution of the day before. The officers accordingly
put her into a sort of sedan chair, or covered litter, in order that
she might be carried by bearers to the place of torture. She was
borne in this way to the spot, but when the executioners opened the
door of the chair to take her out, they beheld a shocking spectacle.
Their wretched victim had escaped from their power. She was hanging
by the neck, dead. She had contrived to make a noose in one end of
the cincture with which she was girded, and fastening the other end
to some part of the chair within, she had succeeded in bringing the
weight of her body upon the noose around her neck, and had died
without disturbing her bearers as they walked along.

[Illustration: BRINGING EPICHARIS TO THE TORTURE.]

In the mean time the various parties that were accused were seized
in great numbers, and were brought in for trial before a sort of
court-martial which Nero himself, with some of his principal
officers, held for this purpose in the gardens of the palace. The
number of those accused was so large that the avenues to the garden
were blocked up with them, and with the parties of soldiers that
conducted them, and multitudes were detained together at the gates,
in a state, of course, of awful suspense and agitation, waiting
their turns. It happened singularly enough that among those whom
Nero summoned to serve on the tribunal for the trial of the
prisoners were two of the principal conspirators, who had not yet
been accused. These were Subrius Flavius and Fenius Rufus, whom the
reader will perhaps recollect as prominent members of the plot.
Flavius was the man who had once undertaken to kill the emperor in