She spoke her own fate in these words.

Here is the account of it by Tacitus.  Nero had made all the preparations; had arranged a barge, that of a sudden its deck might fall heavily upon those in the cabin, and crush them in an instant.  He meant thus to give to the murder which he planned the aspect of an accident.  To this fatal vessel he led Agrippina.  He talked with her affectionately and gravely on the way; “and when they parted at the lakeside, with his old boyish familiarity he pressed her closely to his heart, either to conceal his purpose, or because the last sight of a mother, on the eve of death, touched even his cruel nature, and then bade her farewell.”

Just at the point upon the lake where he had directed, as the Empress sat in her cabin talking with her attendants, the treacherous deck was let fall upon them all.  But the plot failed.  She saw dead at her feet one of her favorites, crushed by the sudden blow.  But she had escaped it.  She saw that death awaited them all upon the vessel.  The men around sprang forward, ready to do their master’s bidding in a less clumsy and more certain way.  But the Empress, with one of her attendants, sprang from the treacherous vessel into the less treacherous waves.  And there, this faithful friend of hers, with a woman’s wit and a woman’s devotion, drew on her own head the blows and stabs of the murderers above, by crying, as if in drowning, “Save me, I am Nero’s mother!” Uttering those words of self-devotion, she was killed by the murderers above, while the Empress, in safer silence, buoyed up by fragments of the wreck, floated to the shore.

Nero had failed thus in secret crime, and yet he knew that he could not stop here.  And the next day after his mother’s deliverance, he sent a soldier to her palace, with a guard; and there, where she was deserted even by her last attendant, without pretence of secrecy, they put to death the daughter and the mother of a Caesar.  And Nero only waits to look with a laugh upon the beauty of the corpse, before he returns to resume his government at Rome.

That moment was the culminating moment of the ancient civilization.  It is complete in its centralizing power; it is complete in its external beauty; it is complete in its crime.  Beautiful as Eden to the eye, with luxury, with comfort, with easy indolence to all; but dust and ashes beneath the surface!  It is corrupted at the head!  It is corrupted at the heart!  There is nothing firm!

This is the moment which I take for our little picture.  At this very moment there is announced the first germ of the new civilization.  In the very midst of this falsehood, there sounds one voice of truth; in the very arms of this giant, there plays the baby boy who is to cleave him to the ground.  This Nero slowly returns to the city.  He meets the congratulations of a senate, which thank him and the gods that he has murdered his own mother.  With the agony of an undying conscience torturing him, he strives to avert care by amusement.  He hopes to turn the mob from despising him by the grandeur of their public entertainments.  He enlarges for them the circus.  He calls unheard-of beasts to be baited and killed for their enjoyment.  The finest actors rant, the sweetest musicians sing, that Nero may forget his mother, and that his people may forget him.