that Agrippina had no thought of destroying the race of Claudius and Messalina, for before his adoption she had married Nero to Octavia, the daughter of the imperial pair.  Octavia was a woman possessed of all the virtues which the ancient Roman nobility had cherished.  She was chaste, modest, patient, gentle, and unselfish, and she would be able to assist in strengthening the power of her house.  Agrippina had therefore, in the ancient manner, affianced the young pair at an early age, and hoped that she might make a couple which would serve as an example to the families of the aristocracy.

In short, Agrippina, far from seeking to weaken the imperial house by destroying the descendants of Messalina, was attempting to bring her son into the family precisely for the purpose of giving it strength.  And, sensible woman that she was, she could hardly have acted otherwise.  She had seen the family of Augustus, once so prosperous, reduced to a state of exhaustion and virtually destroyed by the fatal discord between her mother and Tiberius and the quarrels between her brothers.  The state had suffered greatly through the madness of Caligula and the reckless hatred of the first Agrippina, and the present empress, her daughter, who was not merely fond of her son, but endowed in addition with the gift of reflection, sought as far as possible to make amends for the evils which had unconsciously been wrought.  The hopes of the future were henceforth to abide in Britannicus and in Nero.  In Agrippina there reappeared the wisdom of her greatest predecessors, and the people were so well satisfied that they conferred upon her the very highest honor, such as in her time even Livia herself had not received.  She was given the title Augusta; she was allowed to ride into the precincts of the Capitol in a gilded coach (carpentum), though this was an honor which in old time had been conceded only to priests and to the images of the gods.  This last descendant of Livia and Drusus, in whom the virtues of a venerated past seemed to reappear, was surrounded by a semi-religious adoration.  This is an evidence of sincere and profound respect, for though the Romans often showered marks of human adulation upon their potentates, it was not often that they bestowed honors of so sacred a character.

The unforeseen death of Claudius suddenly cut short the work which Agrippina had well under way.  Claudius was sixty-four years old, and one night in the month of October of the year 54 he succumbed to some mysterious malady after a supper of which, as usual, he had partaken inordinately.  Tacitus pretends to know that Agrippina had secretly administered poison to Claudius in a plate of mushrooms.  During the night, however, fearing lest Claudius would survive, she had called Claudius’s physician, Xenophon, who was a friend of hers.  The latter, while pretending to induce vomiting, had painted his throat with a feather dipped in a deadly poison, and had