nity of Daphne to Babylon, many
compared his fate to that of Alexander the Great. He was celebrated for
humanity and benevolence, as well as military talents, and amidst the
toils of war, found leisure to cultivate the arts of literary genius. He
composed two comedies in Greek, some epigrams, and a translation of
Aratus into Latin verse. He married Agrippina, the daughter of M.
Agrippa, by whom he had nine children. This lady, who had accompanied
her husband into the east, carried his ashes to Italy, and accused his
murderer, Piso; who, unable to bear up against the public odium incurred
by that transaction, laid violent hands upon himself. Agrippina was now
nearly in the same predicament with regard to Tiberius, that Ovid had
formerly been in respect of Augustus. He was sensible, that when she
accused Piso, she was not ignorant of the person by whom the perpetrator
of the murder had been instigated; and her presence, therefore, seeming
continually to reproach him with his guilt, he resolved to rid himself of
a person become so obnoxious to his sight, and banished her to the island
of Pandataria, where she died some time afterwards of famine.

But it was not sufficient to gratify this sanguinary tyrant, that he had,
without any cause, cut off both Germanicus and his wife Agrippina: the
distinguished merits and popularity of that prince were yet to be
revenged upon his children; and accordingly he (244) set himself to
invent a pretext for their destruction. After endeavouring in vain, by
various artifices, to provoke the resentment of Nero and Drusus against
him, he had recourse to false accusation, and not only charged them with
seditious designs, to which their tender years were ill adapted, but with
vices of a nature the most scandalous. By a sentence of the senate,
which manifested the extreme servility of that assembly, he procured them
both to be declared open enemies to their country. Nero he banished to
the island of Pontia, where, like his unfortunate mother, he miserably
perished by famine; and Drusus was doomed to the same fate, in the lower
part of the Palatium, after suffering for nine days the violence of
hunger, and having, as is related, devoured part of his bed. The
remaining son, Caius, on account of his vicious disposition, he resolved
to appoint his successor on the throne, that, after his own death, a
comparison might be made in favour of his memory, when the Romans should
be governed by a s