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Updated: June 13, 2025
Virgine vis sola lotus abdire domum. Leave off; the Bath Bell rings what, still play on? Perhaps the maid in private rubs you down. There were separate places for the two sexes; and indeed there were baths opened for the use of women only, at the expence of Agrippina, the mother of Nero, and some other matrons of the first quality.
Even before Claudius's death, Agrippina had vigorously opposed waste and plunder; it also appears that the reorganisation of finances after Messalina's death was due chiefly to her. The continuation under Nero of this severe régime displeased a great number of persons, who dreamed of seeing again the easy sway of Messalina.
Thus Nero, at the age of seventeen became emperor of Rome, and as such the almost absolute monarch of nearly half the world. It was, however, by no means the design of Agrippina that her son should actually wield, himself, all this power. Her motive, in all her manoeuvers for bringing Nero to this lofty position, was a personal, not a maternal ambition.
Through Octavia, his grandmother, he traced his descent from the family of Cæsar. The Domitii—the paternal ancestors of Nero—had been illustrious for several hundred years, and no one was more distinguished than Lucius Domitius, called Ahenobardus, or Red-Beard, in the early days of the republic. The father of Nero, who married Agrippina, was as infamous for crimes as he was exalted for rank.
Nobody can sympathize with her in the following description better than I, who for years was compelled by the insistence of my Pretty Lady to aid in the bringing up of infants: "I own that when Agrippina brought her first-born son aged two days and established him in my bedroom closet, the plan struck me at the start as inconvenient.
That Antonia, mother to the deceased, bore any part in the funeral, I do not find either in the historians or in the city journals: though, besides Agrippina, and Drusus, and Claudius, his other relations are likewise there recorded by name: whether by sickness she was prevented; or whether her soul vanquished by sorrow, could not bear the representation of such a mighty calamity.
The terms of Julia's exile were made easier; Germanicus married Agrippina, another daughter of Julia and Agrippa, and a sister of Julia the Younger; the widow of Caius Caesar, Livilla, sister of Germanicus and daughter of Antonia, was given to Drusus, the son of Tiberius, a young man born in the same year as Germanicus.
The escaped murderers soon brought the news so impatiently expected but Nero's joy was short. At dawn, a freedman of Agrippina arrived at the Emperor's villa. Agrippina, picked up by a boat, had succeeded in reaching one of her villas near by; she sent the freedman to tell the Emperor about the accident and to assure him of her safety. Agrippina alive!
The emperors of imperial decadent Rome are led by the chains of art behind the chariot wheels of the poet: Julius Cæsar, whom Cato called "that woman," Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, the wicked Agrippina, for whom Agnes Repplier named her cat, Claudius, Nero, Hadrian, Vespasian, down to the incredible Heliogabolus.
Agrippina, though she enjoyed great prestige, had also many hidden enemies. Everybody knew that she represented in the government the old aristocratic, conservative, and economical tendency of the Claudii, of Tiberius and of Drusus, that she looked askance upon the development of luxurious habits, the relaxation of morals, and the increase of public and private expenditures.
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