, her energy, her experience,
she could be of so much service to her son and to the State? We do not
need to attribute to Agrippina a monstrous ambition, as does Tacitus,
in order to explain how the Empire was ruled during the first two
years, by Seneca, Burrhus, and Agrippina; it was a natural consequence
of the situation created by the premature death of Claudius. Tacitus
himself is forced to recognise that the government was excellent.

Helping her son in the apprenticeship of the Empire, Agrippina did her
duty; but during restless times when misunderstanding is almost a
law of social life, it is often very dangerous to do one's duty. The
period of Agrippina and Nero was full of confusion; though apparently
quiet, Italy was deeply torn by the great struggle that gives the
history of the Empire its marvellous character of actuality, the
struggle between the old Roman military society and the intellectual
civilisation of the Orient.

The ancient aristocratic and military Roman society had had so great
and world-wide a success, that the ideas, the institutions and the
customs, that had made it a perfect model of State, considered as an
organ of political and military domination, exercised a great prestige
on the following generations. Even during the time of which we speak,
every one was forced after eight years of peace, to admit that the
Empire had been created by those ideas, those institutions and those
customs; that for the sake of the Empire they must be maintained,
and alike in family as in State, must be opposed all that forms
the essence of intellectual civilisation; that is to say, all
that develops personal selfishness at the expense of collective
interest--luxury, idleness, pleasure, celibacy, feminism, and at
the same time, all that develops personality and intelligence at the
expense of tradition--liberty of women, independence of children,
variety of personal tendencies, and the critical spirit in all forms.

In spite of the resistance offered by traditions, peace and wealth
favoured everywhere the diffusion of the intellectual civilisation of
the Hellenised Orient. The woman now become free, and the intellectual
man now become powerful, were the springs to set in motion this
revolution. Under Claudius, in vain had they exiled Seneca, the
brilliant philosopher and the peace-advocating humanitarian, who had
diffused in high Roman society so many ideas and sentiments considered
by the traditionalists per