Nero's secret police believe they have come on the first hints of a plot against the emperor's life. Once a promising & gifted friend of poets, pupil of the great Seneca, Nero has bloodied himself & grown fat on power. Crass, mediocre men--the military & the secret police--now have his ear. While he & his court give themselves to pleasures increasingly perverse & dissipated, the secret police close in on (or do they foment, or imagine?) the conspiracy of the men of letters.