ornment of that external grandeur, of that old society.

In the infancy of her son, this beautiful Agrippina consulted a troop of
fortune-tellers as to his fate; and they told her that he would live to
be Emperor of Rome, and to kill his mother. With all the ecstasy of a
mother's pride fused so strangely with all the excess of an ambitious
woman's love of power, she cried in answer, "He may kill me, if only he
rules Rome!"[J]

She spoke her own fate in these words.

Here is the account of it by Tacitus. Nero had made all the
preparations; had arranged a barge, that of a sudden its deck might fall
heavily upon those in the cabin, and crush them in an instant. He meant
thus to give to the murder which he planned the aspect of an accident.
To this fatal vessel he led Agrippina. He talked with her affectionately
and gravely on the way; "and when they parted at the lakeside, with his
old boyish familiarity he pressed her closely to his heart, either to
conceal his purpose, or because the last sight of a mother, on the eve
of death, touched even his cruel nature, and then bade her farewell."

Just at the point upon the lake where he had directed, as the Empress
sat in her cabin talking with her attendants, the treacherous deck was
let fall upon them all. But the plot failed. She saw dead at her feet
one of her favorites, crushed by the sudden blow. But she had escaped
it. She saw that death awaited them all upon the vessel. The men around
sprang forward, ready to do their master's bidding in a less clumsy and
more certain way. But the Empress, with one of her attendants, sprang
from the treacherous vessel into the less treacherous waves. And there,
this faithful friend of hers, with a woman's wit and a woman's devotion,
drew on her own head the blows and stabs of the murderers above, by
crying, as if in drowning, "Save me, I am Nero's mother!" Uttering those
words of self-devotion, she was killed by the murderers above, while the
Empress, in safer silence, buoyed up by fragments of the wreck, floated
to the shore.

Nero had failed thus in secret crime, and yet he knew that he could not
stop here. And the next day after his mother's deliverance, he sent a
soldier to her palace, with a guard; and there, where she was deserted
even by her last attendant, without pretence of secrecy, they put to
death the daughter and the mother of a Caesar. And Nero only waits to
look with a laugh upon the beauty of the corpse, before he ret