1Otho's spirit was not soft like his body. 1And his closest freedmen and slaves, kept more licentiously than in a private household, held out before him, greedy as he was for such things, Nero's court and its luxuries, adulteries, marriages and the other lusts of monarchs, as his own if he dared, and reproached him with them, if he stayed quiet, as belonging to others; the astrologers too urged him on, declaring from their observation of the stars that there would be new upheavals and a glorious year for Otho, a breed of men faithless to the powerful, deceitful to the hopeful, which in our state will always be banned and always retained.
1Poppaea's private chambers had kept many astrologers, the worst instruments of an imperial marriage: one of them, Ptolemaeus, Otho's companion in Spain, after he had promised that Otho would outlive Nero, and the outcome had won him credit, had now, by conjecture and by the talk of those reckoning up Galba's old age and Otho's youth, persuaded him that he would be called to the empire. 1But Otho took these predictions as if they came from skill and the warnings of fate, with the craving of human nature to believe the obscure more readily. 1Nor did Ptolemaeus fail him, now also the instigator of the crime, to which one passes very easily from a wish of that kind.