click to read pdf file - The Preterist Archive

MOTHER AND SON 99
his, as adamant to clay
? She had been a princess of the
blood from infancy, surrounded by near relatives who had
been adored in life and deified after death ;
she had enjoyed
power during two reigns, and now at last she had fancied that
she would control the Empire for the remainder of her life.
Was not her skill in intrigue as great as that of Livia ? Was
not her indomitable purpose even more intense ? She forgot
that Livia had been, what Caligula called her,
Ulysses stolatus,
'a Ulysses in petticoats,' a woman with absolute control over
her own emotions. Agrippina, on the other hand, was full of
a wild passion which ruined her caution and precipitated her
end.
And she forgot, more fatally, the total collapse of all Livia's
soaring ambitions. Livia had procured the death of prince
after prince who stood between her son Tiberius and the
throne. Tiberius did indeed become Emperor, but had
'
Zimri peace who slew his master ' ?
Pliny calls Tiberius
'confessedly the gloomiest of men.' He himself wrote to the
Senate that he felt himself daily destroyed by
all the gods and
goddesses. And, after all, his only son died, and he was
succeeded by Caligula, the bad and brutal son of the hated
and murdered Gerinanicus and the hated and murdered
Agrippina the elder. He might have said with the bloodstained
usurper of our great tragedy :
'
Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown,
And put a barren sceptre in my gripe ;
Thence to be wrench' d with an unlineal hand,
No son of mine succeeding.'
Was it likely to be otherwise with her son Nero ?
Nero slight boy as she thought him had hardly "been
seated on the throne when he began to slip out of her control.
Pallas, her secret lover, her chief supporter, was speedily
ejected and disgraced. Seneca and Burrus were botli opposed
to her influence, and neither of them dreaded her vengeance.
Suitors for favours were more anxious to secure the intercession
of Acte than hers. Nero, surrounded by dissolute
young aristocrats, and also by adventurers, buffoons and
parasites, was daily showing himself more indifferent to her
threats, her commands, even her reasonable wishes. He liked
to parade his new-born freedom. She felt sure that among