of his conduct is but too evident; and for a man with such a character to rebut an innuendo is never an easy task.  Nay more, it was after this foul event, at the close of Nero’s first year, that Seneca addressed him in the extravagant and glowing language of his treatise on Clemency.  “The quality of mercy,” and the duty of princes to practise it, has never been more eloquently extolled; but it is accompanied by a fulsome flattery which has in it something painfully grotesque as addressed by a philosopher to one whom he knew to have been guilty, that very year, of an inhuman fratricide.  Imagine some Jewish Pharisee,—­a Nicodemus or a Gamaliel—­pronouncing an eulogy on the tenderness of a Herod, and you have some picture of the appearance which Seneca’s consistency must have worn in the eyes of his contemporaries.

This event took place A.D. 55, in the first year of Nero’s Quinquennium, and the same year was nearly signalized by the death of his mother.  A charge of pretended conspiracy was invented against her, and it is probable that but for the intervention of Burrus, who with Seneca was appointed to examine into the charge, she would have fallen a very sudden victim to the cowardly credulity and growing hatred of her son.  The extraordinary and eloquent audacity of her defence created a reaction in her favour, and secured the punishment of her accusers.  But the ties of affection could not long unite two such wicked and imperious natures as those of Agrippina and her son.  All history shows that there can be no real love between souls exceptionally wicked, and that this is still more impossible when the alliance between them has been sealed by a complicity in crime.  Nero had now fallen into a deep infatuation for Poppaea Sabina, the beautiful wife of Otho, and she refused him her hand so long as he was still under the control of his mother.  At this time Agrippina, as the just consequence of her many crimes, was regarded by all classes with a fanaticism of hatred which in Poppaea Sabina was intensified by manifest self-interest.  Nero, always weak, had long regarded his mother with real terror and disgust, and he scarcely needed the urgency of constant application to make him long to get rid of her.  But the daughter of Germanicus could not be openly destroyed, while her own precautions helped to secure her against secret assassination.  It only remained to compass her death by treachery.  Nero had long compelled her to live in suburban retirement, and had made no attempt to conceal the open rapture which existed between them.  Anicetus, admiral of the fleet at Misenum, and a former instructor of Nero, suggested the expedient of a pretended public reconciliation, in virtue of which Agrippina should be invited to Baiae, and on her return should be placed on board a vessel so constructed as to come to pieces by the removal of bolts.  The disaster might then be attributed to a mere naval accident, and Nero might make the most ostentatious display of his affection and regret.