was then forty-nine years of age. He had fifteen years of life
yet before him, and was to gain much valuable experience, and get an
insight into a side of existence he had not yet known.

Agrippina was born in Cologne, which was called, in her honor, Colonia
Agrippina, and now has been shortened to its present form. Whenever you
buy cologne, remember where the word came from.

Agrippina, from her very girlhood, had a thirst for adventure, and her
aim was high. When fourteen, she married Domitius, a Roman noble, thirty
years her senior. He was as worthless a rogue as ever wore out his
physical capacity for sin in middle life, and filled his dying days with
crimes that were only mental. He knew himself so well that when Nero was
born he declared that the issue of such a marriage could only breed a
being who would ruin the State--a monster with his father's vices and
his mother's insatiable ambition.

Agrippina was woman enough to hate this man with an utter detestation;
but he was rich, and so she endured him for ten years, and then assisted
Nature in making him food for worms.

The intensity of Agrippina's nature might have been used for happy ends
if the stream of her life had not been so early dammed and polluted. She
loved her child with a clutching, feverish affection, and declared that
he would some day rule Rome. This was not really such a far-away dream,
when we remember that her brother was then Emperor and childless. Her
thought was more for her child than for herself, and her expectation was
that he would succeed Caligula. The persistency with which she told this
ambition for her boy is both beautiful and pathetic. Every mother sees
her own life projected in her child, and within certain bounds this is
right and well.

Glimpses of kindness and right intent are shown when Agrippina recalled
Seneca, and when she became the mother of the motherless children of
Claudius. She publicly adopted these children, and for a time gave them
every attention and advantage that was bestowed upon her own son. Gibbon
says for one woman to mother another woman's children is a diplomatic
card often played, but Gibbon sometimes quibbles.

Gradually the fierce desire of Agrippina's heart began to manifest
itself. She plotted and arranged that Nero should marry Octavia, the
daughter of Claudius. Octavia was seven years older than Nero, but the
sooner the marriage could be brought about, the better--it would give
her a double h