Nero, seated on a throne, has slaves summoned. Each drinks poison and dies, the second even though he can see the corpse of his predecessor. It makes me think of an old joke with the punchline "You call this living?" In many ways, this clear bit of drama is from a stage performance. Equally clearly, it is the beginning of the costume epic in movies. One of the earliest Italian epics was produced a dozen years later and was about Nero -- clearly a fine subject for evil high living, The director, Georges Hatot, continued to work in the films until the end of the first decade of the 20th Century and had a taste for story films.