Nero could afford to scorn his enemies. For a decade and more he had been straining on the leash, eager to break free from the prescriptions of a crabbed and superseded order and to create, as befitted the supreme artist that he was, his own reality. The Senate, wounded and demoralised, appeared powerless to resist him; the people, enraptured by his command of fantasy and spectacle, eager to participate in his reconfiguring of what it might mean to be a Roman.
