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When the play of Afranius, called The Conflagration, was put on the stage, a house must be really burned and its furniture really plundered. In the mime called Laureolus an actor must really be crucified and mangled by a bear, and really fling himself down and deluge the stage with blood.
Such were the spectacles at which Nero loved to gaze through his emerald eye-glass. And worse things than these things indescribable, unutterable. Infamous mythologies were enacted, in which women must play their part in torments of shamefulness more intolerable than death. A St. Peter must hang upon the cross in the Pincian gardens, as a real Laureolus upon the stage.
And in the piece called Laureolus, in which the principal actor, running out in a hurry, and falling, vomited blood, several of the inferior actors vying with each other to give the best specimen of their art, made the whole stage flow with blood.
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