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Updated: June 10, 2025
After she descended from the ship, accompanied with her two infants, carrying in her bosom the melancholy urn, with her eyes cast steadily down; equal and universal were the groans of the beholders: nor could you distinguish relations from strangers, nor the wailings of men from those of women, unless that the new-comers, who were recent in their sallies of grief, exceeded Agrippina's attendants, wearied out with long lamentations.
They considered this arrangement of Agrippina's to be present at their debates as intended to intimidate them into the support of such measures as she might recommend, or be supposed to favor, and thus as seriously interfering with the freedom of their discussions.
Gibbon says for one woman to mother another woman's children is a diplomatic card often played, but Gibbon sometimes quibbles. Gradually the fierce desire of Agrippina's heart began to manifest itself. She plotted and arranged that Nero should marry Octavia, the daughter of Claudius.
He must have formed an important member of Agrippina's party, which was in daily and deadly enmity against the party of Narcissus. He must have watched the incessant artifices by which Agrippina secured the adoption of her son Nero by an Emperor whose own son Britannicus was but three years his junior.
"Agrippina's beautifully ringed tail flapping across my copy distracts my attention and imperils the neatness of my penmanship.
Nero would never have dared commit such a misdeed, in the eyes of the Roman almost a sacrilege, if he had not been encouraged by Agrippina's unpopularity, by the violent hatred of so many against his mother.
Agrippina, a bitter and violent woman, became the evil genius of the next reign. Of this Agrippina's children, Drusus and Caligula went mad and her daughter was the mother of the madman Nero. To me the record suggest this: that the marriage with, not the divorce of, Scribonia was a grave mistake on the part of Octavian; bringing down four generations of terible karma.
The maid, after a moment's pause, fled too, Agrippina saying to her as she disappeared, "Are you, too, going to forsake me?" At the same moment, Anicetus forced open the door of entrance, and came in accompanied by two of his officers. The three armed men, with an expression of fierce and relentless determination upon their countenances, advanced to Agrippina's bedside.
Then besides, even if Agrippina's resentment were to subside, and she should seem entirely to abandon all idea of ever executing her threats, Nero was extremely unwilling to remain thus in his mother's power exposed continually to fresh outbreaks of her hostility, whenever her anger or her caprice might arouse her again.
Notwithstanding some occasional difficulties and embarrassments of this kind, every thing went on for a time very prosperously, in accordance with Agrippina's wishes and plans. Nero was very young, and little disposed at first to thwart or to resist his mother's measures.
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