the
rumour of Agrippina's escape they rushed off in a body to her villa to
express their congratulations, where they were dispersed by the soldiers
of Anicetus, who had already token possession of it. Scattering or
seizing the slaves who came in their way, and bursting their passage
from door to door, they found the Empress in a dimly-lighted chamber,
attended only by a single handmaid. "Dost thou too desert me?"
exclaimed the wretched woman to her servant, as she rose to slip away.
In silent determination the soldiers surrounded her couch, and Anicetus
was the first to strike her with a stick. "Strike my womb," she cried to
him faintly, as he drew his sword, "for it bore Nero." The blow of
Anicetus was the signal for her immediate destruction: she was
dispatched with many wounds, and was buried that night at Misenum on a
common couch and with a mean funeral. Such an end, many years
previously, this sister, and wife, and mother of emperors had
anticipated and despised; for when the Chaldaeans had assured her that
her son would become Emperor, and would murder her, she is said to have
exclaimed, "Occidat dum imperet," "Let him slay me if he but reign."

It only remained to account for the crime, and offer for it such lying
defences as were most likely to gain credit. Flying to Naples from a
scene which had now become awful to him,--for places do not change as
men's faces change, and, besides this, his disturbed conscience made him
fancy that he heard from the hill of Misenum the blowing of a ghostly
trumpet and wailings about his mother's tomb in the hours of night,--he
sent from thence a letter to the Senate, saying that his mother had been
punished for an attempt upon his life, and adding a list of her crimes,
real and imaginary, the narrative of her _accidental_ shipwreck, and his
opinion that her death was a public blessing. The author of this
shameful document was Seneca, and in composing it he reached the nadir
of his moral degradation. Even the lax morality of a most degenerate age
condemned him for calmly sitting down to decorate with the graces of
rhetoric and antithesis an atrocity too deep for the powers of
indignation. A Seneca could stoop to write what a Thrasea Paetus could
scarcely stoop to hear; for in the meeting of the Senate at which the
letter was recited, Thrasea rose in indignation, and went straight home
rather than seem to sanction by his presence the adulation of a
matricide.

And the compositi