Insisting on wanting to make a Roman of this young debauche, Agrippina made him into a murderer.  Nero, progressing from one caprice to another, finally imagined a great folly:  to divorce Octavia and to raise to her place a beautiful freed-woman called Acte.  According to one of the fundamental laws of the State, the great law of Augustus on marriage, which forbade marriages between senators and freedwomen, the union of Nero and Acte could be only a concubinage.  Agrippina wanted to avoid this scandal; and, as Nero persisted in his idea, it seems that she actually thought of having him deposed and of securing the choice of Britannicus, a very serious young man, as his successor.  A true Roman, Agrippina was ready to sacrifice her son for the sake of the Republic.

The threat was, or appeared to be, so serious to Nero, that it made him step over the threshold of crime.  One day during a great dinner to which he had been invited by Nero, Britannicus was suddenly seized with violent convulsions.  “It is an attack of epilepsy,” said Nero calmly, giving orders to his slaves to remove Britannicus and care for him.  The young man died in a few hours and every one believed that Nero had poisoned him.

This dastardly crime aroused at first a sense of horror and fright among the people, but the impression did not last long.  In spite of all his faults, Nero was liked.  In Rome they had respected Augustus and hated Tiberius; they had killed Caligula and jeered at Claudius; Nero seemed to be the first of the Roman Emperors who stood a chance of becoming popular.  Contrary to Agrippina’s ideas, it was his frivolity that pleased the great masses, because this frivolity corresponded to the slow but progressive decay of the old Roman virtues in them.  They expected from Nero a less hard, less severe, less parsimonious government—­in a word, a government less Roman than the rule of his predecessors, a government which, instead of force, glory, and wisdom, meant pleasure and ease.

So it happened that many soon forgot the unfortunate Britannicus, and some even tried to justify Nero by invoking State necessity.  Agrippina alone remained the object of the universal hatred, as the sole cause of so many misfortunes.  Implacable enemies, concealed in the shadow, were subtly at work against her; they organised a campaign of absurd calumnies in the Court itself, and it is this campaign from which Tacitus drew his material.

Some wretches finally dared even accuse her of conspiracy against the life of her son.  Agrippina, refusing to plead for herself, still weathered the storm, because Nero was afraid of her, and though he tried to escape from her authority, did not dare to initiate any energetic move against her.  To engage in a final struggle with so indomitable a woman, another woman was necessary.  This woman was Poppaea Sabina, a very handsome and able dame of the great Roman nobility.  Poppaea represented Oriental feminism in its most dangerous form:  a woman completely demoralised by luxury, elegance, society life, and voluptuousness, who eluded all her duties toward the species in order to enjoy and make others enjoy her beauty.