ABSTRACT
Nero committed suicide on 9 June, AD 68 with the help of his scribe, Epaphroditus, realising that his cause was lost after derafting an appeal to the Roman people. Nero's decision late in AD 6613 to leave Italy for a tour of Greece and to take the opportunity to participate in a number of the great Greek literary and athletic festivals has all the appearance of escapism the chance to leave his unpopularity behind and bask in the adulation of his Greek subjects. The news that Galba received at Clunia about a week after Nero's death was not death-sentence that he had been expecting, but an invitation to become Rome's sixth princeps and first not to have been descended from Julii or the Claudii. Pointedly, in his account of the closing days of the reign of Galba, and the Emperor's search for a successor, Tacitus, put into Galba's mouth an oration that has since been called a manual of statecraft.
