FORTUNE soon afterwards made a dupe of Nero through his own credulity and
the promises of Csellius Bassus, a Carthaginian by birth and a man of
a crazed imagination, who wrested a vision seen in the slumber of night into
a confident expectation. He sailed to Rome, and
having purchased admission to the emperor, he explained how he had
discovered on his land a cave of immense depth, which contained a vast
quantity of gold, not in the form of coin, but in the shapeless and
ponderous masses of ancient days. In fact, he said, ingots of great weight
lay there, with bars standing near them in another part of the cave, a
treasure hidden for so many ages to increase the wealth of the present.
Phnician Dido, as he sought to show by inference, after fleeing from
Tyre and founding Carthage, had concealed these riches in
the fear that a new people might be demoralised by a superabundance of
money, or that the Numidian kings, already for other reasons hostile, might
by lust of gold be provoked to war.
