Fortune favoured her.  The dreaded Narcissus, the most formidable obstacle to her murderous plans, was seized with an attack of the gout.  Agrippina managed that his physician should recommend him the waters of Sinuessa in Campania by way of cure.  He was thus got out of the way, and she proceeded at once to her work of blood.  Entrusting the secret to Halotus, the Emperor’s praegustator—­the slave whose office it was to protect him from poison by tasting every dish before him—­and to his physician, Xenophon of Cos, she consulted Locusta, the Mrs. Turner of the period of this classical King James, as to the poison best suited to her purpose.  Locusta was mistress of her art, in which long practice had given her a consummate skill.  The poison must not be too rapid, lest it should cause suspicion; nor too slow, lest it should give the Emperor time to consult for the interests of his son Britannicus; but it was to be one which should disturb his intellect without causing immediate death.  Claudius was a glutton, and the poison was given him with all the more ease because it was mixed with a dish of mushrooms, of which he was extravagantly fond.  Agrippina herself handed him the choicest mushroom in the dish, and the poison at once reduced him to silence.  As was too frequently the case, Claudius was intoxicated at the time, and was carried off to his bed as if nothing had happened.  A violent colic ensued, and it was feared that this, with a quantity of wine which he had drunk, would render the poison innocuous.  But Agrippina had gone too far for retreat, and Xenophon, who knew that great crimes if frustrated are perilous, if successful are rewarded, came to her assistance.  Under pretence of causing him to vomit, he tickled the throat of the Emperor with a feather smeared with a swift and deadly poison.  It did its work, and before morning the Caesar was a corpse.[34]

[Footnote 34:  There is usually found among the writings of Seneca a most remarkable burlesque called Ludus de Morte Caesaris.  As to its authorship opinions will always vary, but it is a work of such undoubted genius, so interesting, and so unique in its character, that I have thought it necessary to give in an Appendix a brief sketch of its argument.  We may at least hope that this satire, which overflows with the deadliest contempt of Claudius, is not from the same pen which wrote for Nero his funeral oration.  It has, however, been supposed (without sufficient grounds) to be the lost [Greek:  Apokolokuntoois] which Seneca is said to have written on the apotheosis of Claudius.  The very name is a bitter satire.  It imagines the Emperor transformed, not into a God, but into a gourd—­one of those “bloated gourds which sun their speckled bellies before the doors of the Roman peasants.”  “The Senate decreed his divinity; Seneca translated it into pumpkinity” (Merivale, Rom.  Emp. v. 601).  The Ludus begins by spattering mud on the memory of the divine Claudius; it ends with a shower of poetic roses over the glory of the diviner Nero!]