Meanwhile the general dissatisfaction was coming to a head, as we may infer from the urgency with which the imperial freed man Helius insisted upon Nero's return to Italy. Revolt started in Gaul with the insurrection of Julius Vindex, governor of Gallia Lugdunensis. It is probable that the aims of Vindex included the liberation of northern Gaul, which would explain both the en thusiasm of the Gallic chiefs, and the opposition of the legions of the Rhine. This force defeated Vindex at Vesontio (Besancon) and offered the throne to their own commander Virginius Rufus, who refused it. Meanwhile the governors of Hispania, Tarra conensis and Galba and Otho, had rebelled, and Galba had claimed the throne. Nero returned from Greece to Naples for further revels.
Suicide.—The revolts in Spain and Germany terrified him too late into something like energy. The senate almost openly in trigued against him, and the populace were silent or hostile. The fidelity of the praetorian sentinels even was more than doubtful. When finally the palace guards forsook their posts, Nero despair ingly stole out of Rome to seek shelter in a freedman's villa some four miles off. There he heard of the senate's proclamation of Galba as emperor, and of the sentence of death passed on him self. On the approach of the horsemen sent to drag him to execu tion, he collected sufficient courage to save himself by suicide. Nero died on June 9, 68, in the 31st year of his age and the four teenth of his reign, and his remains were deposited by the faithful Acte in the family tomb of the Domitii on the Pincian hill. With his death ended the line of the Caesars, and Roman imperialism entered a new phase. His statues were broken, his name every where erased, and his "golden house" demolished.
The Roman populace for a long time reverenced his memory as that of an open-handed patron, and in Greece the recollections of his magnificence, and his enthusiasm for art, were still fresh when the traveller Pausanias visited the country a century later. The
belief that he had not really died, but would return again to con f ound his foes, was long prevalent, not only in the remoter prov inces, but even in Rome itself ; and more than one pretender was able to collect a following by assuming the name of the last of the race of Augustus. More lasting still was the implacable hatred of those who had suffered from his cruelties. Roman literature, faith fully reflecting the sentiments of the aristocratic salons of the capital, while it almost canonized those who had been his victims, fully avenged their wrongs by painting Nero as a monster of wickedness. In Christian tradition he even appears as the mystic Antichrist, who was destined to come once again to trouble the saints. Even in the middle ages, Nero was still the very incarna tion of splendid iniquity, while the belief lingered that he had only disappeared for a time, and as late as the 11th century his restless spirit was supposed to haunt the slopes of the Pincian hill.
The chief ancient authorities for Nero's life and reign are Tacitus (Annals, xiii.–xvi., edit. Furneaux), Suetonius, Dio Cassius (Ejit. lxi., lxii., lxiii.) and Zonaras (Ann. xi.). The most important modern work is that of B. W. Henderson, The Life and Principate of the Emperor Nero (1903; see an important notice in Class. Rev. vol. xviii. p. 57), which contains full bibliography of ancient and modern writers: see also H. Schiller's Nero, and Geschichte d. Kaiserzeit; Lehmann, Claudius and Nero; Desider Kostolanyi, Nero (1928).