cities, stricken by earthquake, fire, or flood.  And yet the Oriental influence, so favourable to unproductive and luxurious expenditure, gained ground steadily.  The merchant of Syrian and Egyptian objects de luxe, in spite of the sumptuary laws, found a yearly increasing patronage in all the cities of Italy.  The exactingness of the desire for public spectacles increased, even in secondary cities.  The Italian people were losing their peasant’s petty avarice and growing fond of things monumental and colossal, which was the great folly of the Orient.  They found the monuments of Rome poor; everywhere, even in modest municipia, they demanded immense theatres, great temples, monumental basilicas, spacious forums, adorned with statues.  In spite of the principles insisted upon with so much vigour by Augustus and Tiberius, public finances had, thanks to the weak Claudius and the extravagant Messalina, already gone through a period of great waste and disorder.

These contradictions, and the psychological disorder that followed, explain the discords and struggles very soon raging around the young Emperor.  The public began to feel shocked by the attention that Agrippina gave to State affairs, as by a new and this time intolerable scandal of feminism.  Agrippina was not a feminist, as a matter of fact, but a traditionalist, proud of the glory of her family, attached to the ancient Roman ideas, desirous only of seeing her son develop into a new Germanicus, a second Drusus.  Solely the necessity of helping Nero had led her to meddle with politics.  But not in vain had Cato declaimed so loudly in Rome against women who pretend to govern states; not in vain had Augustus’s domination been at least partly founded on the great antifeminist legend of Antony and Cleopatra, which represented the fall of the great Triumvir as the consequence of a woman’s influence.  The public, although willing to give all possible freedom to women in other things, still remained quite firm on this point:  politics must remain the monopoly of man.  So to the popular imagination, Agrippina soon became a sort of Roman Cleopatra.  Many interests gathered quickly to reinforce this antifeminist reaction, which, although exaggerated, had its origin in sincere feeling.

Agrippina, as a true descendant of Drusus, meant to prepare her son to rule the Empire according to the principles held by his great ancestors.  Among these principles was to be counted not only the defence of Romanism and the maintenance of the aristocratic constitution, but also a wise economy in the management of finances.  Agrippina is a good instance of that well-known fact—­the British have noticed it more than once in India—­that in public administration discreet and capable women keep, as a rule, the spirit of economy with which they manage the home.  This is why, especially in despotic states, they rule better than men.  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.