Surrounded by a crowd of slaves, mistresses and flatterers, he permitted his empire to be administered by unworthy favourites, while he squandered the money wrung from his provinces on costly buildings and expensive gifts to the churches of his metropolis.
After her death in 1806 he was drawn into other intrigues by flatterers, and, in October 1807, was arrested for the conspiracy of the Escorial.
His flatterers called the king Philip the Great.
The third satire, imitated by Samuel Johnson in his London, presents such a picture as Rome may have offered to the satirist at any time in the 1st century of our era; but it was under the worst emperors, Nero and Domitian, that the arts of flatterers and foreign adventurers were most successful, and that such scenes of violence as that described at 2 77 seq.
