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Acte and Lygia rose, thinking that Poppæa would pass the bench without turning attention to either; but she halted before them and said, "Acte, the bells sent by thee for the doll were badly fastened; the child tore off one and put it to her mouth; luckily Lilith saw it in season." "Pardon, divinity," answered Acte, crossing her arms on her breast and bending her head.
So, raising his head and looking over the shoulder of Lygia at the young freedwoman, he said with malice: "The hour has passed, Acte, when thou didst recline near Cæsar's side at banquets, and they say that blindness is threatening thee; how then canst thou see him?" But she answered as if in sadness: "Still I see him. He, too, has short sight, and is looking at thee through an emerald."
Acte spoke with great compassion, and even with enthusiasm; and being a little short-sighted, she pushed her sweet face up to Lygia's as if wishing to see surely the effect of her words. But Lygia threw her arms around Acte's neck with childish trustfulness and said, "Thou art kind, Acte."
Acte was the only person who could explain everything, and there was need to see her before others. Convinced of this, he commanded the slaves to hasten; and along the road he thought without order, now of Lygia, now of revenge. He had heard that Egyptian priests of the goddess Pasht could bring disease on whomever they wished, and he determined to learn the means of doing this.
These were therefore at once disfranchised, although some of them were in office at the time, and thus placed under a disability to take office, or buy and sell anything. After some time, however, the franchise was restored to them. The same summer the Dians took Thyssus, a town on Acte by Athos in alliance with Athens.
But the maiden answered with a voice so low that Acte could barely hear it, "I would rather flee to the Lygians." And two tears were hanging on her drooping lids. Further conversation was stopped by the rustle of approaching steps, and before Acte had time to see who was coming, Poppæa Sabina appeared in front of the bench with a small retinue of slave women.
And next came a statute against witchcraft. In 1603 is an act to prohibit people from eating anything but fish in Lent, entitled "An Acte to encourage the Seamen of England to take Fishe, wherebie they may encrease to furnishe the Navie of England."
The definitive break with his mother and with her political ideas, that is, with the ideas which had been professed by her ancestors, came in 58, when Nero forgot Acte for Poppaea Sabina. The latter belonged to one of those great Roman families into which the new spirit and the new customs had most deeply penetrated.
Yet he who wrote these noble words was not only a flatterer to his imperial pupil, but is charged with having deliberately encouraged him in a foolish passion for a freedwoman named Acte, into which Nero fell.
She said, moreover, that she was now ready and willing to enter into and promote his views, and she offered him the use of certain private apartments of her own in the palace, to meet Acte in, saying that, by such an arrangement, and with the precautions that she could use, he could enjoy the society of his favorite whenever he pleased, without interruption and without danger.
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