The move was entirely successful.  The illusion that the imperial authority was only a transitory expedient made necessary by the civil wars, and that it might one day be entirely abolished, was still deeply grounded in the Roman aristocracy.  Every relaxation of authority was specially pleasing to the senatorial circles.  The government of Nero therefore began under the most favorable auspices, with joyous hope in the general promise of concord.  The disaffection which had been felt in the last six years of Claudius’s government was changed into a general and confident optimism, which the first acts of the new government and the signs of the future seemed to justify.  Agrippina continued to keep Nero subject to her authority, as she had done before the election:  together with his two masters, Seneca and Burrhus, she suggested to him every word and deed.  The senate resumed its ancient functions; and governed by Seneca, Burrhus, and Agrippina in conjunction with the senate, the empire seemed to be progressing wonderfully, and in the eyes of the senators the entire government was in a better way than it ever yet had been.

But the situation soon changed.  Agrippina, to be sure, had given her son a strictly Roman education, and had brought him up with a simplicity and rigor long since out of fashion; and though she had early given him a wife, she continued to keep him subject to maternal authority.  But, with all this, it is doubtful if there ever was a temperament which rebelled against this species of education as strongly as did Nero’s.  His taste for the arts of drawing and singing, the indifference which he had shown for the study of oratory from his childhood, these were the seeds from which as time went on his raging exoticism was to be developed through the use and abuse of power.  His was one of those rioting, contrary, and undisciplined temperaments which feel that they must do precisely the opposite of what tradition, education, and the general opinion of the society in which they live have prescribed as necessary and recognized as lawful.  In the case of Nero the defects and the dangers in the ancient Roman education were to become apparent.

The first of these dangers declared itself when Nero entered upon one of those early marriages of which we have spoken in the first of these studies.  Agrippina had early arranged an alliance with a young lady who, because of her virtues, nobility of ancestry, and Roman education, might have become his worthy companion; but a year after his elevation to the imperial dignity, the eighteen-year-old youth made the acquaintance of a woman whose beauty inflamed his senses and imagination to the point of making him entirely forget Octavia, whom he had married from a sense of duty and not for love.  This person was Acte, a beautiful Asiatic freedwoman, and the inexperienced, ardent youth, already given up to exotic fancies, became so enamoured that he one day proposed to repudiate Octavia and to marry