But these men gained additional power from the countenance and intrigues of the young and beautiful wife of Claudius, Valeria Messalina.  In his marriage, as in all else, Claudius had been pre-eminent in misfortune.  He lived in an age of which the most frightful sign of depravity was that its women were, if possible, a shade worse than its men; and it was the misery of Claudius, as it finally proved his ruin, to have been united by marriage to the very worst among them all.  Princesses like the Berenice, and the Drusilla, and the Salome, and the Herodias of the sacred historians were in this age a familiar spectacle; but none of them were so wicked as two at least of Claudius’s wives.  He was betrothed or married no less than five times.  The lady first destined for his bride had been repudiated because her parents had offended Augustus; the next died on the very day intended for her nuptials.  By his first actual wife, Urgulania, whom he had married in early youth, he had two children, Drusus and Claudia; Drusus was accidentally choked in boyhood while trying to swallow a pear which had been thrown up into the air.  Very shortly after the birth of Claudia, discovering the unfaithfulness of Urgulania, Claudius divorced her, and ordered the child to be stripped naked and exposed to die.  His second wife, Aelia Petina, seems to have been an unsuitable person, and her also he divorced.  His third and fourth wives lived to earn a colossal infamy—­Valeria Messalina for her shameless character, Agrippina the younger for her unscrupulous ambition.

Messalina, when she married, could scarcely have been fifteen years old, yet she at once assumed a dominant position, and secured it by means of the most unblushing wickedness.

But she did not reign so absolutely undisturbed as to be without her own jealousies and apprehensions; and these were mainly kindled by Julia and Agrippina, the two nieces of the Emperor.  They were, no less than herself, beautiful, brilliant, and evil-hearted women, quite ready to make their own coteries, and to dispute, as far as they dared, the supremacy of a bold but reckless rival.  They too, used their arts, their wealth, their rank, their political influence, their personal fascinations, to secure for themselves a band of adherents, ready, when the proper moment arrived, for any conspiracy.  It is unlikely that, even in the first flush of her husband’s strange and unexpected triumph, Messalina should have contemplated with any satisfaction their return from exile.  In this respect it is probable that the Emperor succeeded in resisting her expressed wishes; so that the mere appearance of the two daughters of Germanicus in her presence was a standing witness of the limitations to which her influence was subjected.