The women of the Caesars

It is easy to understand why the peace and harmony which had been reestablished for a moment in the troubled imperial family by the advent of Caligula should have been of brief duration. His grandmother and his sisters were Romans, educated in Roman ideals, and this exotic madness of his could inspire in them only an irresistible horror. This brought confusion into the imperial family, and after having suffered the persecutions of Sejanus and his party, the unhappy daughters of Germanicus found themselves in the toils of the exacting caprices of their brother. In fact, in 38, Caligula had already broken with his grandmother, whom the year before he had had proclaimed Augusta; and between the years 38 and 39, catastrophes followed one another in the family with frightful rapidity. His sister Drusilla, whom, as Suetonius tells us, he already treated as a lawful wife, died suddenly of some unknown malady while still very young. It is not improbable that her health may have been ruined by the horror of the wild adventure, which was neither human nor Roman, into which her brother sought to drag her by marriage. Caligula suddenly declared her a goddess, to whom all the cities must pay honors. He had a temple built for her, and appointed a body of twenty priests, ten men and ten women, to celebrate her worship; he decreed that her birthday should be a holiday, and he wished the statue of Venus in the Forum to be carved in her likeness.

But in proportion as Caligula became more and more fervid in this adoration of his dead sister, the disagreement between himself and his other two sisters became more embittered. Julia Livilla was exiled in 38; Agrippina, the wife of Domitius Enobarbus, in 39, and about this same time the venerable Antonia died. It was noised about that Caligula had forced her to commit suicide, and that Agrippina and Livilla had taken part in a conspiracy against the life of the emperor. How much truth there may be in these reports it is difficult to say, but the reason for all these catastrophes may be affirmed with certainty. Life in the imperial palace was no longer possible, especially for women, with this madman who was transforming Rome into Alexandria and who wished to marry a sister. Even Tiberius, the son of Drusus and co-heir to the empire with Caligula, was at about this time defeated in some obscure suit and disappeared.

Caligula therefore remained alone at Rome to represent in the imperial palace the family which only ironically can be considered as the most fortunate in Rome. Of three generations, upon whom fate seemed to have showered all the gifts of life, there remained at his side only Claudius, the clownish old man, the plaything of slaves and freedmen, whom no one molested because all could make game of him. A madman and an imbecile,—or at least one who was reputed such by everybody,—this was all that remained of the family of Augustus seventy years after the battle of Actium.

Alone, with no sisters now to elevate to the divine honors of the Roman Olympus, Caligula was reduced to hunting for wives in the families of the aristocracy. But it seems that even there could be found no great abundance of women who had all the necessary qualities to make them the Olympian consorts of so capricious a god. In three years he married and repudiated three—and in a very strange manner, if we are to trust the ancient accounts of Caligula's loves. The first was Livia Orestilla, the wife of Caius Piso. The emperor, who had seen the woman at the marriage celebration, became, we are told, so infatuated with her that he obliged the husband to divorce her; he then married her, and a few days later repudiated her. Caligula is said to have compared himself on this occasion to Romulus who ravished the Sabine woman, and to Augustus who raped Livia. The second was Lollia Paulina, wife of Caius Memmius, proconsul of a distant province. Caligula heard of the prodigious beauty of Lollia's grandmother. The portrayal of her charms made him fall in love with her granddaughter, though absent and distant. He gave orders for her immediate recall to Rome, and as soon as she could be divorced from her husband he married her. This union, like the former one, lasted only a brief time. The third wife was Milonia Caesonia, and to her Caligula was more faithful, though from the accounts of ancient writers she appears to have been much older than he, rather homely, and already a mother of three daughters when he first loved her. It is difficult to determine how much truth there is in these reports: Caligula was, it is true, a raving maniac, and his frenzy became more accentuated when under the sway of love—a passion which deranges somewhat even wise men. It is not strange, therefore, that in regard to women he may have been guilty of even greater excesses than he was capable of in his dealings with men. Yet some of these accounts seem a little incredible even when ascribed to a madman. However that may be, Livia Orestilla, Lollia Paulina, Milonia Caesonia are figures without relief, shades and ghosts of empresses, no one of whom had time enough even to occupy the highest post. In vain the people expected that there would appear in the imperial palace a worthy successor to Livia. Caligula, like all madmen, was by nature solitary, and could not live with other human beings: he was to remain alone, a prey to his ravings, which became even stranger and more violent. He now wished to impose upon the empire the worship of his own person, without considering any opposition or local traditions and superstitions. In doing this he did violence not only to the civic and republican sentiment of Italy, which detested this worship of a living man as an ignoble oriental adulation, but also to the religious feeling of the Hebrews, to whom this cult appeared most horrible and idolatrous.

In this way difficulties, dissatisfaction, and sedition arose in all parts of the empire. The extravagances, the wild expenditures, the riotous pleasures, and the cruelties of Caligula increased the discontent and disgust on every hand. We need not take literally all the accounts of his cruelty and violence which ancient writers have transmitted to us,—even Caligula has been blackened,—but it is certain that his government in the last two years of his reign degenerated into a reckless, extravagant, violent, and cruel tyranny. One day the empire awoke in terror to the fact that the imperial family—that family in which the legions, the provinces, and the barbarians saw the keystone of the state—no longer existed; that in the vast imperial palace, empty of women, empty of children, empty of hope, there wandered a raging madman of thirty-one, who divorced a wife every six months, who foolishly wasted the treasure and the blood of his subjects, and who was concerned with no other thought than that of having himself worshiped like a god in flesh and blood by all the empire. A conspiracy was formed in the palace itself, and Caligula was killed.

The senate was much perplexed when it heard of the death of Caligula. What was to be done? The majority was inclined to restore the former republican government by abolishing the imperial authority, and to give back to the senate the supreme direction of the state, which little by little had passed into the hands of the emperor. But many recognized that this return to the ancient form of government would be neither easy nor without danger. Could the senate, neglected, divided, and disregarded as it was, succeed in governing the immense empire? On the other hand, it was not much easier to find an emperor, granted that an emperor was henceforth necessary. In the family of Augustus there was only Claudius, too foolish and ridiculous for them to think of making him the head of the state. It seems that some eminent senator offered his candidacy, but the senate hesitated in perplexity, on the ground that if the authority of the members of the family of Augustus was already so uncertain, so debatable, and so darkly threatened, what would happen to a new emperor, unknown to the legions and the provinces, and unsupported by the glory of his ancestors? While the senate was debating in such uncertainty, the pretorians discovered Claudius in a corner of the imperial palace, where he had been cowering through fear lest he too be killed. Recognizing in him the brother of Germanicus, the pretorians proclaimed him emperor. An act of will is always more powerful than a thousand scruples or hesitations: the senate yielded to the legions, and recognized Claudius the imbecile as emperor.

But Claudius was not an imbecile, although he appeared such to many. Instead, he was, so to speak, a man half-grown, in whom certain parts of the mind were highly developed, but whose character had remained that of a child, timid, capricious, impulsive, giddy, and incapable of self-mastery. In intellect he was learned, even cultivated; he was fond of studies, of history, literature, and archaeology, and spoke and wrote well. But Augustus had been forced to give up the attempt to have him enter upon a political career because he had been unable to make him acquire even that exterior bearing which confers the necessary dignity upon him who exercises great power, to say nothing of the firmness, precision, and force of will required in governing men. Credulous, timorous, impressionable, and at the same time obstinate, gluttonous, and sensual, this erudite, overgrown boy had become in the imperial palace a kind of plaything for everybody, especially for his slaves, who, knowing his defects and his weaknesses, did with him what they wished.

He did not lack the intellectual qualities necessary for governing well, but of the moral qualities he had none. He was intelligent, and he looked stupid: he was able to consider the great questions of politics, war, and finance with breadth of view, with original and acute intelligence, but he never succeeded in having himself taken seriously by the persons who surrounded him. He dared undertake great projects, like the conquest of Britain, and he lost his head at the wildest fable about conspiracy which one of his intimates told him; he had mind sufficient to govern the empire as well as Augustus and Tiberius had done, but he could not succeed in getting obedience from four or five slaves or from his own wife.

Such a man was destined to turn out a rather odd emperor, at once great and ridiculous. He made important laws, undertook gigantic public works and conquests of great moment; but in his own house he was a weak husband, incapable of exercising any sort of authority over his wife. With these conjugal weaknesses he seriously compromised the imperial authority, while at the same time he was consolidating it and rendering it illustrious with beautiful and wise achievements, especially in the first seven years of his rule, while he lived with Valeria Messalina.

We must admit in his justification that in this matter he had not been particularly fortunate; for fate had given him to wife a lady who, notwithstanding her illustrious ancestors,—she belonged to one of the greatest families of Rome, related to the family of Augustus,—was not exactly suited to be his companion in the imperial dignity. Every one knows that the name of Valeria Messalina has become in history synonymous with all the faults and all the vices of which a woman can be guilty. This, as usual, is the result of envy and malevolence which never offered truce to the family of Augustus as long as any of its members lived. Many of the infamies which are attributed to her are evidently fables, complacently repeated by Tacitus and Suetonius, and easily believed by posterity. But it is certain that if Messalina was not a monster, she was a beautiful woman, capricious, gay, powerful, reckless, avid of luxury and of money, who had never scrupled to abuse the weakness of her husband in any way either by deceiving him or by obliging him to follow her will and her caprice in everything. She was a woman, in short, neither very virtuous nor serious. There are such women at all times and in all social classes, and they are generally considered by the majority not as monsters, but as a pleasing, though dangerous, variety of the feminine sex. Under normal conditions, nevertheless, when the husband exercises a certain energy and sagacity, even the danger which may result from them is relatively slight.

But chance had made of Messalina an empress, and Messalina was not a sufficiently intelligent or serious woman to understand that if she had been able to abuse the weakness of Claudius with impunity while he had been the most obscure member of the imperial family, it was a much more difficult matter to continue to abuse it after he had become the head of the state. It was from this error that all their difficulties arose. Elated by her new position, Messalina more than ever took advantage of her husband's infirmity. She began by starting new dissensions in the imperial family. Claudius had recalled to Rome the two victims of Caligula's Egyptian caprices, Agrippina and Julia Livilla; but if the latter no longer found a brother in Rome to persecute them, they did find their aunt, and they had gained but little by the exchange. Messalina soon took umbrage at the influence which the two sisters acquired over the mind of their weak-willed uncle, and it was not long before Julia Livilla was accused under the Lex de adulteriis, and exiled with Seneca, the famous philosopher, whom they wished rightly or wrongly to pass off as her lover. Agrippina, like her mother, was a virtuous woman, as is proved by the fact that she could not be attacked with such weapons and was enabled to remain in Rome; though she also had to live prudently and beware of her enemy, and much the more as she had only recently become a widow and could therefore not even count upon the protection of a husband. Though Agrippina remained at Rome, she was isolated and reduced to a position of helplessness.

Messalina alone, together with four or five intelligent and unscrupulous freedmen, hedged Claudius about, and there began the period of their common government—a government of incredible waste and extortion. Among these freedmen there were, to be sure, men like Narcissus and Pallas, intelligent and sagacious, who did not aim merely at putting money into their purses, but who helped Claudius to govern the empire properly. Messalina, on the other hand, thought only of acquiring wealth, that she might dissipate it in luxury and pleasures. The wife of the emperor had been selling her influence to the sovereign allies and vassals, to all the rich personages of the empire, who desired to obtain any sort of favor from the imperial authority; she had been seen bartering with the contractors for public works, mingling in the financial affairs of the state every time that there was any occasion to make money. And with the money thus amassed she indulged in ostentatious displays which violated all the prohibitions of the Lex sumptuaria, leading a life of unseemly pleasures, in which it is easy to imagine what sort of example of all the finer feminine virtues she set. Claudius either knew nothing of all this or else submitted without protest.

Messalina then, with her peculiar levity of character and violence of temperament, continued to emphasize the modernizing Asiatic tendency introduced by Caligula into the state, and was influential in destroying the puritanic traditions of Rome and replacing them by the corruption and pomp of Asia. Her rôle was exactly the opposite of that of Livia. The latter had been the embodiment of the conservative virtues of traditionalism: the former by her egoism, her extravagance, and her wantonness was in a fair way to destroy all such traditions. Livia had been almost a vestal in her fight for the puritanism of old Rome: Messalina most ardently and violently fought to destroy it.

Such an empress, however, could hardly please the public. While those who profited by her dissipations greatly admired Messalina, a lively movement of protest was soon started among the people, for they, unlike many of the aristocrats, who affected modern views and who pretended to scorn the traditions of ancient Rome, were faithful to all such puritanical traditions and wished to see at their emperor's side a lady adorned with all the fairer virtues of the ancient matron—with those virtues, in short, which Livia had personified with such dignity. How could they tolerate this sort of dissipated Bacchante, who should have been condemned to infamy and exile with the many other Roman women who had been faithless to their husbands; who with the effrontery of her unpunished crimes dishonored and rendered ridiculous the imperial authority?

To the middle classes the emperor was a semi-sacred magistrate, charged with maintaining by law and example the purity of the family, fidelity in marital relations, and simplicity of customs. Now, to their amazement, they saw in the person of the empress all the dissipations, corruptions, and perversions of the woman who wished to live only for her pleasure, to enjoy her beauty, and to have others enjoy it, enthroned, to the scandal of all honest minds, in the palace of the emperor. Furthermore, it seemed to every one a scandal that one who was an emperor should at the same time be a weak husband; for the simple good sense of the Latin would not admit that a man who could govern an empire should not be able to command a woman. It soon became the general opinion of all reasonable people that Messalina, in the position of Livia upon the Palatine, and with so weak a husband, was not only a scandal, but also a continual menace to the public.

Nevertheless, it would now have been no easy matter, even if the emperor had wished it, to convict an empress of infidelity and disobedience to one of the great laws of Augustus. Caligula was a madman and had been able to secure three divorces, but a wiser emperor would have to think for a long time before rendering public the shame and scandals of his family, especially when confronted with an aristocracy which was as eager to suspect and calumniate as was the aristocracy of Rome. But the problem became hopeless as soon as the emperor did not see or did not wish to see the faults of his wife. Would any one dare to step forward and accuse the empress?

The situation gradually became grave and dangerous. The state, governed with intelligence, but without energy, with vast contradictions and hesitations, was being strengthened along certain lines and was going to pieces along others. The power and extortions of the freedmen were breeding discontent on every hand. Both through what she really did, and what the populace said she had done, Messalina was being transformed by the people into a legendary personage whose infamous deeds aroused general indignation; but all in vain.

It now became quite evident that an empress was virtually invulnerable, and that, once enthroned upon the Palatine, there was no effective means of protesting against the various ways in which she could abuse her lofty position unless the emperor wished to interfere. In its exasperation, the public finally vented upon Claudius the anger which the violence and misconduct of Messalina had aroused. They declared that it was his weakness which was responsible for her conduct; and intrigues, deeds of violence, conspiracies, and attempts at civil war became, as Suetonius says, every-day occurrences at Rome.

A sense of insecurity and doubt was spreading throughout the state as a result of the indecision of the emperor, and all began to ask themselves how long a government could last which was at the mercy of a wanton. The violent death of Caligula, which was still fresh in the minds of the people, added to this wide-spread feeling of insecurity and alarm. As Caligula, notwithstanding the pontifical sacredness of his person, had been slain, to the apparent satisfaction of everybody, in his palace by a handful of his supposed friends and supporters, it seemed possible that the tragedy might easily be repeated in the case of Claudius. Could not the whole Claudian government be overturned,—in a single night, perhaps, as that of Caligula had been overturned? All hearts were filled with suspicion, distrust, and alarm, and many concluded that since Claudius had not succeeded in ridding the empire of Messalina it would be well to rid it of Claudius.

So for seven years Messalina remained the great weakness of a government which possessed signal merits and accomplished great things. Of all the emperors in the family of Augustus, Claudius was certainly the one whose life was most seriously threatened, especially because of his wife. Such a situation could not endure.

It finally resolved itself into a tragic scandal, which, if we could believe Suetonius and Tacitus, would certainly have been the most monstrous extravagance to which an imagination depraved by power could have abandoned itself. According to these writers, Messalina, at a loss for some new form of dissipation, one fine day took it into her head to marry Silius, a young man with whom she was very much in love, who belonged to a distinguished family, and who was the consul-designate. According to them, for the pleasure of shocking the imperial city with the sacrilege of a bigamous union, she actually did marry him in Rome, with the most solemn religious rites, while Claudius was at Ostia! But is this credible, at least without admitting that Messalina had suddenly gone insane? To what end and for what reason would she have committed such a sacrilege, which struck at the very heart of popular sentiment? Dissolute, cruel, and avaricious Messalina certainly was, but mad she was not. And even if we are willing to admit that she had gone mad, is it conceivable that all those who would have had to lend her their services in the staging of this revolting farce had also gone mad? It is difficult to suppose that they acted through fear, for the empress had no such power in Rome that she could constrain conspicuous persons publicly to commit such sacrilege.

This episode would probably be an unfathomable enigma had not Suetonius by chance given us the key to its solution: "Nam illud omnem fidem excesserit, quod nuptiis, quas Messalina cum adultero Silio fecerat, tabellas dotis et ipse consignaverit" ("For that which would pass all belief is the fact that in the marriage which Messalina contracted with the adulterer Silius, he himself [Claudius] should have signed the figures for the dowry"). If Claudius himself gave a dowry to the bride, he therefore knew that the marriage of Messalina and Silius was to take place; and it is precisely this fact which seems so incredible to Suetonius. But we know that in the Roman aristocracy a man could give away his own wife in this manner; for have we not recounted in this present history how Livia was dowered and given in marriage to Augustus by her first husband, the grandfather of Claudius? The deeding of a wife with a dowry was a part of the somewhat bizarre marriage customs of the Roman aristocracy, which gradually lost ground in the first and second century of our era in proportion as the prestige and power of that aristocracy declined, and in proportion as the middle classes acquired influence in the state and succeeded in imposing upon it their ideas and sentiments. The passage in Suetonius proves to us that he no longer understood this matrimonial custom, and it is doubtful whether even Tacitus thoroughly understood it. Nor is it improbable that it should have seemed strange even to many of the contemporaries of Claudius. We could therefore explain how, not really understanding what had happened, the historians of the following century should have believed that Messalina had married Silius while she was still the wife of Claudius.

In short, Claudius had been persuaded to divorce Messalina and to marry her to Silius. The passage from Suetonius, if carefully interpreted, clearly tells us this. What means were employed to persuade Claudius to consent to this new marriage we do not know. Suetonius refers to this, but he is not clear. In any case, this point is less important than that other question: Why was Messalina, after seven years of empire, willing to divorce Claudius and marry Silius? The problem is not an easy one, but after long examination I have decided to accept with slight modification the explanation given by Umberto Silvagni in his beautiful work, "The Empire and the Women of the Caesars," a book which contains many original ideas and much acute observation.

Silvagni, who is an excellent student of Roman history, has well brought out how Silius belonged to a family of the aristocracy famous for its devotion to the party of Germanicus and Agrippina. His father, who had been a great friend of Germanicus, had been one of the victims of Sejanus, and accused in the time of Tiberius under the law of high treason, he had committed suicide. His mother, Sosia Galla, had been condemned to exile on account of her devotion to Agrippina. Starting out with these considerations, and examining acutely the accounts of all the ancient historians, Silvagni concluded that behind this marriage there lay a conspiracy to ruin Claudius and to put Caius Silius in his place. Messalina must sooner or later have felt that the situation was an impossible one, that Claudius was not a sufficiently strong or energetic emperor to be able to impose the disorganized government of himself and his freedmen upon the empire, and that any day he might fall a prey to a plot or an assassination. What would happen, she must have asked herself, if Claudius, like Caligula, should some day be despatched by a conspiracy? The same fate would doubtless be waiting for her, for, having killed him, the conspirators would certainly murder her also. Consequently she entertained the idea of ruining the emperor herself in order to contribute to the elevation of his successor, and thus to preserve at his side the position which she had occupied in the court of Claudius. But once Claudius had been slain, there would be no other member of the family of Augustus old enough to govern. She therefore decided to choose him in a family famous for its devotion to Germanicus and the more popular branch of the house, thus hoping the more easily to win over the legions and the pretorians to the cause of the new emperor, Since the descendants of Drusus were dead, what other option remained to her than to choose a successor in the families of the aristocracy who had shown for them the greatest devotion and love?

Thus, for the first time, a woman was placed at the head of a really vast political conspiracy destined to wrest the supreme power from the family of Augustus; and this woman proved her sagacity by knowing how to organize this great plot so well and so opportunely that the most intelligent and influential among the freedmen of Claudius debated for a long time whether they would join her or throw in their lot with the emperor. So doubtful seemed the issue of this struggle between the weak husband and the energetic, audacious, and unscrupulous wife! They allowed Messalina and Silius to enlist friends and partisans in every part of Roman society, to come to an understanding with the prefect of the guards, to obtain the divorce from Claudius, even to celebrate their marriage, without opening the eyes of the emperor. Claudius would probably have been destroyed if at the last moment Narcissus had not decided to rush to the emperor, who was at Ostia, and, by terrifying him in some unspeakable way, had not induced him to stamp out the conspiracy with a bold and unexpected stroke. There followed one of those periods of judicial murder which for more than thirty years had been costing much Roman blood, and in this slaughter Messalina, too, was overthrown.

After the discovery of the conspiracy, Claudius made a harangue to the soldiers, in which he told them that as he had not been very successful in his marriages he did not intend to take another wife. The proposal was wise, but difficult of execution, for there were many reasons why the emperor needed to have a woman at his side. We very soon find Claudius consulting his freedmen on the choice of a new wife. There was much discussion and uncertainty, but the choice finally fell upon Agrippina. That choice was significant. Agrippina was the niece of Claudius, and marriages between uncle and niece, if not exactly prohibited, were looked upon by the Romans with a profound revulsion of feeling. Claudius and his freedmen could not have decided to face this repugnance except for serious and important reasons. Among these the most serious was probably that after the experience with Messalina, it seemed best not to go outside the family. An empress belonging to the family would not be so likely to plot against the descendants of Augustus as had been this strange woman, who belonged to one of those aristocratic families who deeply hated the imperial house. Agrippina, furthermore, was the daughter of Germanicus. This was a powerful recommendation with the people, the pretorian cohorts, and the legions. In addition, she was intelligent, cultured, simple, and economical; she had grown up in the midst of political affairs, she knew how the empire was governed, and up to this point she had lived a life above reproach. She seemed to be the woman above all others destined to make the people forget Messalina and to reestablish among the masses respect for the family of Augustus, now seriously compromised by many scandals and dissensions. Furthermore, she did not seem to suffer too much by comparison with Livia.

Claudius asked the senate to authorize marriages between uncles and nieces, as he did not dare to assume the responsibility of going counter to public sentiment. And thus the daughter of Germanicus and the sister of Caligula became an empress.

VI

AGRIPPINA, THE MOTHER OF NERO

It is possible, as Tacitus says, that marriage with Claudius was the height of Agrippina's ambition, but it is also possible that it was an act of supreme self-sacrifice on the part of a woman who had been educated in the traditions of the Roman aristocracy, and who therefore considered herself merely a means to the political advancement of her relatives and her children.

I am rather inclined to accept this second explanation. When she married Claudius, Agrippina not only married an uncle who was much older than herself, and who must necessarily prove a rather difficult and disagreeable husband, but she bound up her fate with that of a weak emperor whose life was continually threatened by plots and revolts, and whose hesitations and terrors plainly portended that he would one day end by precipitating the imperial authority and government into some bizarre and terrible catastrophe. For Agrippina it meant that she was blindly staking her life and her honor, and that she would lose them both should she fail to compensate for the innumerable deficiencies of her strange husband through her own intelligence and strength of will. Every one will recognize how difficult was the task which she had undertaken.

But at the beginning fortune favored Agrippina as she boldly took up the work that lay before her. The wild pranks of Caligula and the scandals of Messalina had aroused an immeasurable disgust in Rome and Italy. Every one was out of patience. The senate as well as the people were demanding a stronger, more coherent, and respectable government, which would end the scandals, suits, and atrocious personal and family quarrels which were dividing Rome. Agrippina was the daughter of Germanicus, the granddaughter of Drusus, and she had in her veins the blood of the Claudii, with all their pride, their energy, their puritanical, conservative, and aristocratic spirit, and the moment she appeared, all hopes were centered in her. Although she was a sort of feminine Tiberius, and in the purity of her life resembled her mother and her great-grandmother Livia, Tacitus nevertheless maligns her for her relationships with Pallas and Seneca. The fact that Messalina, even with her implacable hatred, failed to bring about her downfall under the Lex de adulteriis, proves the unreliability of these statements, and Tacitus proves it himself when he says that she suffered no departure from chastity unless it helped her power (Nihil domi impudicum nisi dominationi expediret). This means that Agrippina was a lady of irreproachable life; for if there is one thing which stands out clearly in the history of this remarkable woman, it is that both her rise and her fall depended upon causes of such a nature that not even her womanly charms could have increased her power or retarded her ruin. All hearts were therefore filled with hope when they saw this respectable, active, and energetic woman take her place at the side of Claudius the weakling, for she brought back the memory of the most venerated personages of the family of Augustus.

The new empress, encouraged by this show of favor, applied herself with all the strength of her impassioned nature to the task of again making operative in the state those traditional ideas of the nobility in which Livia had educated first Tiberius and Drusus, then Germanicus, and then Agrippina herself. In this descendant of hers the spirit of the great-grandmother finally reappeared, for it had been eclipsed by the fatal and terrible struggle between Tiberius and Agrippina, by the madness of Caligula, and the comic scandals of the first part of the reign of Claudius. All this served to bring back into the state a little of that authoritative vigor which the nobility in the time of its splendor had considered the highest ideal of government. Tacitus says of her rule that it was as rigid as if a man's (adductum et quasi virile). This signifies that under the influence of Agrippina the laxity and disorder of the first years of Claudius's reign gave place to a certain order and discipline. Severity there was, and more often haughtiness (palam severitas ac saepius superbia). The freedmen who had formerly been so powerful and aggressive, now stepped aside, which is an evident sign that their petulance had now found a check in the energy of Agrippina. The state finances and the fortune of the imperial house were reorganized, for Agrippina, like Livia and like all the ladies of the great Roman nobility, was an excellent administrator, frugal, and ever watchful of her slaves and freedmen, and careful of all items of income and expense. The Roman aristocracy, like all other aristocracies, hated the parvenus, the men of sudden riches, traffickers who had too quickly become wealthy, and all persons whose only aim was to amass money. We know that Agrippina sought to prevent as far as possible the malversations of public funds by which the powerful freedmen of Claudius had been enriching themselves. After she became empress we hear accounts of numerous suits instituted against personages who had been guilty of wasting public treasure, while under Messalina no such cases were brought forward. We know, furthermore, that she reestablished the fortune of the imperial family, which in all probability had been seriously compromised by the reckless expenditures of Messalina. This is what Tacitus refers to in one of his sentences, which, as usual, is colored by his malignity: Cupido auri immensa obtentum habebat quasi subsidium regno pararetur (She sought to enrich the family under the pretext of providing for the needs of the empire). What Tacitus calls a "pretext" was, on the contrary, the ancient aristocratic conception of wealth, which in the eyes of the great families was destined to be a means of government and an instrument of power: the family possessed it in order to use it for the benefit of the state.

In short, Agrippina attempted to revive the aristocratic traditions of government which had inspired the policies of Augustus and Tiberius. Not only did she attempt to do this, but, strange as it may seem, she succeeded almost without a struggle. The government of Agrippina was from the first a great success. From the moment when she became empress there is discernible in the entire administration a greater firmness and consistency of policy. Claudius no longer seems, as formerly, to be at the mercy of his freedmen and the fleeting impulses of the moment, and even the dark shadows of the time are lighted up for some years. A certain concord and tranquillity returned to the imperial house, to the aristocracy, to the senate, and to the state. Although Tacitus accuses Agrippina of having made Claudius commit all sorts of cruelties, it is certain that trials, scandals, and suicide became much less frequent under her rule. During the six years that Claudius lived after his marriage with Agrippina, scandalous tragedies became so rare that Tacitus, being deprived of his favorite materials, set down the story of these six years in a single book. In other words, Agrippina encountered virtually no opposition, while Tiberius and even Augustus, when they wished to govern according to the traditions of the ancient nobility, had to combat the party of the new aristocracy, with its modern and oriental tendencies. This party no longer seemed to exist when Agrippina urged Claudius to continue resolutely in the policy of his ancestors, for one party only, that of the old nobility, seemed with Agrippina to control the state. This must have been the result partly of the disgust for the scandals of the previous decade, which had made every one realize the need of restoring more serious discipline in the government, and partly of the exhaustion which had come upon both parties as the result of so many struggles, reprisals, suits, and scandals. The force of the opposition in the two factions gradually diminished. A greater gentleness induced all to accept the direction of the government without resistance, and the authority of the emperor and his counselors acquired greater importance in proportion as the strength of the opposition in the aristocracy and the senate became gradually weaker.

In any case, the empire was no longer to have forced upon it the ridiculous and scandalous spectacle of such weaknesses and incongruities as had seriously compromised the prestige of the highest authority in the first period of the reign of Claudius. But Agrippina was not content with merely making provision as best she could for the present; she also looked forward to the future. She had had a son by her first husband, and at the time of her marriage with Claudius this youth was about eleven years old. It is in connection with her plans for this son that Tacitus brings his most serious charges against Agrippina. According to his story, from the first day of her marriage Agrippina attempted to make of her son, the future Emperor Nero, the successor of Claudius, thereby excluding Britannicus, the son of Messalina, from the throne.

To obtain this end, she spared, he says, neither intrigues, fraud, nor deceit; she had Seneca recalled from exile and appointed tutor of her child. She removed from office the two commanders of the pretorian guard, who were creatures of Messalina, and in their stead she had elected one of her own, a certain Afranius Burrhus. She laid pitfalls for Britannicus and surrounded him with spies, and in the year 50, by dint of much intrigue and many caresses, she finally succeeded in having Claudius adopt her son. But this whole story is merely a complicated and fantastic romance, embroidered about a truth which in itself is comparatively simple. Tacitus himself tells us that Agrippina was a most exacting mother; that is, a mother of the older Roman type—in his own words, trux et minax. She did not follow the gentle methods of the newer education, which were gradually being introduced into the great families, and she had brought up her son in the ancient manner with the greatest simplicity. It is well to keep in mind, furthermore, that neither Britannicus nor Nero had any right to the throne of Claudius. The hereditary principle did not yet exist in the imperial government: the senate was free to choose whomsoever it wished. To be sure, up to that time the choice had always fallen upon a member of the Augustan family; but it had only been because it was easier to find there persons who were known and respected, who commanded the admiration of the soldiers in distant regions, and who had received a certain preparation for the diverse and often difficult duties of their office. And it was precisely for this reason that Augustus and Tiberius had always sought to prepare more than one youth for the highest office, both in order that the senate might have a certain freedom of choice, and also that there might be some one in reserve, in case one of these young men should disappoint the hopes of the empire or should die prematurely, as so many others had died. That she should have persuaded Claudius to adopt her son does not mean, therefore, that she wished to set Britannicus aside and give the advantage to Nero. It merely proves that she did not wish the family of Augustus to lose the supreme power, and for this reason she intended to prepare not only one successor, but two possible successors, to Claudius, just as Augustus had for a long time trained both Drusus and Tiberius.

In order to understand how wise and reasonable the conduct of Agrippina really was, we must also remember that Nero was four years older than Britannicus, and that, therefore, in the year 50, when Nero was adopted, Britannicus was a mere lad of nine. As Claudius was already sixty, it would have been most imprudent to designate a nine-year-old lad as his only possible successor, when Nero, who was four years his senior, would have been better prepared than Britannicus to take up the reign. There is a further proof that Agrippina had no thought of destroying the race of Claudius and Messalina, for before his adoption she had married Nero to Octavia, the daughter of the imperial pair. Octavia was a woman possessed of all the virtues which the ancient Roman nobility had cherished. She was chaste, modest, patient, gentle, and unselfish, and she would be able to assist in strengthening the power of her house. Agrippina had therefore, in the ancient manner, affianced the young pair at an early age, and hoped that she might make a couple which would serve as an example to the families of the aristocracy.

In short, Agrippina, far from seeking to weaken the imperial house by destroying the descendants of Messalina, was attempting to bring her son into the family precisely for the purpose of giving it strength. And, sensible woman that she was, she could hardly have acted otherwise. She had seen the family of Augustus, once so prosperous, reduced to a state of exhaustion and virtually destroyed by the fatal discord between her mother and Tiberius and the quarrels between her brothers. The state had suffered greatly through the madness of Caligula and the reckless hatred of the first Agrippina, and the present empress, her daughter, who was not merely fond of her son, but endowed in addition with the gift of reflection, sought as far as possible to make amends for the evils which had unconsciously been wrought. The hopes of the future were henceforth to abide in Britannicus and in Nero. In Agrippina there reappeared the wisdom of her greatest predecessors, and the people were so well satisfied that they conferred upon her the very highest honor, such as in her time even Livia herself had not received. She was given the title Augusta; she was allowed to ride into the precincts of the Capitol in a gilded coach (carpentum), though this was an honor which in old time had been conceded only to priests and to the images of the gods. This last descendant of Livia and Drusus, in whom the virtues of a venerated past seemed to reappear, was surrounded by a semi-religious adoration. This is an evidence of sincere and profound respect, for though the Romans often showered marks of human adulation upon their potentates, it was not often that they bestowed honors of so sacred a character.

The unforeseen death of Claudius suddenly cut short the work which Agrippina had well under way. Claudius was sixty-four years old, and one night in the month of October of the year 54 he succumbed to some mysterious malady after a supper of which, as usual, he had partaken inordinately. Tacitus pretends to know that Agrippina had secretly administered poison to Claudius in a plate of mushrooms. During the night, however, fearing lest Claudius would survive, she had called Claudius's physician, Xenophon, who was a friend of hers. The latter, while pretending to induce vomiting, had painted his throat with a feather dipped in a deadly poison, and had killed him. This version is so strange and improbable that Tacitus himself does not dare affirm it, but says that "many believe" that it was in this manner that Claudius met his death. But if there are still people credulous enough to believe that the head of a great state can be poisoned in the twinkling of an eye by a doctor who brushes his throat with a feather, it is more difficult to understand what grounds Agrippina could have had for poisoning her husband. According to Tacitus, it was because she was disturbed by the fact that Claudius had for some time shown that he preferred Britannicus to Nero; but even if the fact were true, as a motive it would be ridiculous. Augustus was much fonder of Germanicus than he was of Tiberius; and yet at his death the senate chose Tiberius, and not Germanicus, because at that moment the situation clearly called for the former as head of the empire. When Claudius died, Britannicus was thirteen and Nero seventeen years old. They were both, therefore, mere lads, and it was most probable that if the imperial seat fell vacant, the senate would choose neither, since they were both too young and inexperienced. This is so true that other historians have supposed, on the contrary, that Agrippina had fallen out with some one of the more powerful freedmen of Claudius, and seeing Claudius waver, had despatched him in order that she herself should not end like Messalina. But this hypothesis also is absurd. An empress was virtually invulnerable. Messalina had proved this, for she had committed every excess and abuse with impunity. Agrippina, protected as she was by the respect of all, invested with honors that gave her person a virtually sacred character, had nothing to fear either from the weak Claudius or from his powerful freedmen.

This accusation of poisoning, therefore, seems to be of precisely the same sort as, and not a whit more serious than, all those other similar accusations which were brought against the members of the Augustan family. Claudius, who was already sixty-four, in all probability died a sudden but natural death, and from the point of view of the interests of the house of Augustus, which Agrippina had strongly at heart, he died much too soon. It was a dangerous and difficult matter to ask the Roman senate to appoint one of these striplings commander of the armies and emperor, even though they were the only survivors of the race of Augustus. So true is this that Tacitus tells us that Agrippina kept the death of Claudius secret for many hours and pretended that the physicians were still struggling to save him, when in reality he was already dead, dum res firmando Neronis imperio componuntur (while matters were being arranged to assure the empire to Nero). Consequently, if everything had to be hurried through in confusion at the last moment, it is plain that Agrippina herself must have been taken by surprise by the illness and death of Claudius. She therefore cannot be held responsible for having caused it.

It is not, however, difficult to reconstruct the course of events. On the nights of the twelfth and thirteenth of October, soon after Claudius had been suddenly stricken down by his violent malady, the doctors announced to Agrippina that the emperor was lost. Agrippina immediately understood that since the family of Augustus could at that moment present no full-grown man as candidate for the imperial office, there was grave danger that the senate might refuse to confer the supreme power either upon Nero or Britannicus. The only means of avoiding this danger was to bring pressure to bear upon the senate through the pretorian cohorts, which were as friendly to the family of Augustus as the senate was hostile. She must present one of the two youths to the guards and have him acclaimed not head of the empire, but head of the armies. The senate would thereby be constrained to proclaim him head of the empire, as they had done in the case of Claudius.

But which one of the two youths was it best to choose, Claudius's son by blood or his son by adoption? Nero was chosen as the result of the unrighteous ambition of Agrippina, so Tacitus says. It is very probable that Agrippina was more eager to see her own son at the head of the empire than to see Britannicus there; but this does not seem to have been the real reason of her choice, for it could not have been otherwise, even if Agrippina had detested Nero and had cherished Britannicus with a maternal affection. Nero was four years older than Britannicus, and therefore he had to be given the preference over the latter. It was a very bold move to propose that the senate make a youth of seventeen emperor; it would have been nothing less than folly to ask that they accept a thirteen-year-old lad as commander-in-chief of the imperial armies of Rome.

Through the help of Seneca and Burrhus, the plan developed by Agrippina was carried out with rapidity and success. On the thirteenth of October, after matters had been arranged with the troops, the doors of the imperial palace were thrown open at noon; Nero, accompanied by Burrhus, advanced to the cohort which was on guard. He was received with joyous welcome, placed in a litter, borne to the quarters of the pretorians, and acclaimed head of the army. The senate grudgingly confirmed his election. There resulted in Rome a most extraordinary situation: a youth of seventeen, educated in the antique manner, and, though already married, still entirely under the tutelage of a strict mother, had been elevated to the highest position in the immense empire. He was ignorant of the luxury, pleasure, and elegance which were becoming general in the great families; outside of a lively disposition and docility toward his mother, he had up to this point shown no special quality, and no particular vice. Only one peculiarity had been noticed in him: he had studied with great zest music, painting, sculpture, and poetry, and had made himself proficient in these arts, which were considered frivolous and useless for a Roman noble. On the contrary, he had neglected oratory, which was held a necessary art by an aristocracy like the Roman, whose duty it was to use speech at councils, in the tribunals, and in the senate, just as it used the sword on the fields of battle. But the majority believed that this was merely a passing caprice of youth.