asseverations that he would never again submit himself to such a yoke.
But he was so completely a tool in the hands of his own courtiers that
no one attached the slightest importance to anything which he had said.

The marriage of an uncle with his own niece was considered a violation
of natural laws, and was regarded with no less horror among the Romans
than it would be among ourselves. But Agrippina, by the use of means the
most unscrupulous, prevailed over all her rivals, and managed her
interests with such consummate skill that, before many months had
elapsed, she had become the spouse of Claudius and the Empress of Rome.

With this princess the destinies of Seneca were most closely
intertwined, and it will enable us the better to understand his
position, and his writings, if we remember that all history discloses to
us no phenomenon more portentous and terrible than that presented to us
in the character of Agrippina, the mother of Nero.

Of the virtues of her great parents she, like their other children, had
inherited not one; and she had exaggerated their family tendencies into
passions which urged her into every form of crime. Her career from the
very cradle had been a career of wickedness, nor had any one of the many
fierce vicissitudes of her life called forth in her a single noble or
amiable trait. Born at Oppidum Ubiorum (afterwards called in her honour
Colonia Agrippina, and still retaining its name in the form Cologne),
she lost her father at the age of three, and her mother (by banishment)
at the age of twelve. She was educated with bad sisters, with a wild and
wicked brother, and under a grandmother whom she detested. At the age of
fourteen she was married to Cnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, one of the most
worthless and ill-reputed of the young Roman nobles of his day. The
gossiping biographies of the time still retain some anecdotes of his
cruelty and selfishness. They tell us how he once, without the slightest
remorse, ran over a poor boy who was playing on the Appian Road; how on
another occasion he knocked out the eye of a Roman knight who had given
him a hasty answer; and how, when his friend congratulated him on the
birth of his son (the young Claudius Domitius, afterwards the Emperor
Nero), he brutally remarked that from people like himself and Agrippina
could only be born some monster destined for the public ruin.

Domitius was forty years old when he married Agrippina, and the young
Nero was not