[Illustration:  Statue of Agrippina the Younger, in the Capitoline Museum, Rome.]

Agrippina, then, with the assistance of Seneca and Burrhus, had kept the highest office in the state in the family of Augustus, and she had done so by a bold move which had not been without its dangers.  She was too intelligent not to foresee that a seventeen-year-old emperor could have no authority, and that his position would expose him to all sorts of envy and intrigue, and to open as well as secret opposition.  She succeeded in mitigating this evil and in parrying this danger by another very happy suggestion—­the virtually complete restoration of the old republican constitution.  After the funeral of Claudius, Nero introduced himself to the senate, and in a polished and modest discourse, seemingly intended to excuse his youth, he declared that of all the powers exercised by his predecessors he wished to keep only the command of the armies.  All other civil, judicial, and administrative functions he turned over to the senate, as in the times of the republic.

This “restoration of the republic” was Agrippina’s masterpiece, and marks the zenith of her power.  It followed, as a result of her decision, that Nero, who was to go down to posterity as the most terrible of tyrants, was that one of all the Roman emperors who had the most limited power; and furthermore it was likewise the result of her activity that the constitution of the empire had never been so close to that of the ancient republic as under the government of Nero.  Most historians, hallucinated by Tacitus, have not noticed this, and they have consequently not recognized that in carrying out this plan Agrippina is neither more nor less than the last continuator of the great political tradition founded by Augustus.  In the minds of both Augustus and Tiberius the empire was to be governed by the aristocracy.  The emperor was merely the depositary of certain powers of the nobility conceded to him for reasons of state.  If these reasons of state should disappear, the powers would naturally revert to the nobles.  It was therefore expedient at this time to make the senate forget, in the presence of a seventeen-year-old emperor, the pressure which had been brought to bear upon it by the cohorts, and to wipe out the rancor against the imperial power which was still dormant in the aristocracy.  This restoration was not, therefore, a sheer renunciation of privileges and powers inherent in the sovereign authority, but an act of political sagacity planned by a woman whose knowledge of the art of government had been received in the school of Augustus.

[Illustration:  Agrippina the Younger.]