s head at the
wildest fable about conspiracy which one of his intimates told him; he
had mind sufficient to govern the empire as well as Augustus and
Tiberius had done, but he could not succeed in getting obedience from
four or five slaves or from his own wife.

Such a man was destined to turn out a rather odd emperor, at once great
and ridiculous. He made important laws, undertook gigantic public
works and conquests of great moment; but in his own house he was a weak
husband, incapable of exercising any sort of authority over his wife.
With these conjugal weaknesses he seriously compromised the imperial
authority, while at the same time he was consolidating it and rendering
it illustrious with beautiful and wise achievements, especially in the
first seven years of his rule, while he lived with Valeria Messalina.

We must admit in his justification that in this matter he had not been
particularly fortunate; for fate had given him to wife a lady who,
notwithstanding her illustrious ancestors,--she belonged to one of the
greatest families of Rome, related to the family of Augustus,--was not
exactly suited to be his companion in the imperial dignity. Every one
knows that the name of Valeria Messalina has become in history
synonymous with all the faults and all the vices of which a woman can
be guilty. This, as usual, is the result of envy and malevolence which
never offered truce to the family of Augustus as long as any of its
members lived. Many of the infamies which are attributed to her are
evidently fables, complacently repeated by Tacitus and Suetonius, and
easily believed by posterity. But it is certain that if Messalina was
not a monster, she was a beautiful woman, capricious, gay, powerful,
reckless, avid of luxury and of money, who had never scrupled to abuse
the weakness of her husband in any way either by deceiving him or by
obliging him to follow her will and her caprice in everything. She was
a woman, in short, neither very virtuous nor serious. There are such
women at all times and in all social classes, and they are generally
considered by the majority not as monsters, but as a pleasing, though
dangerous, variety of the feminine sex. Under normal conditions,
nevertheless, when the husband exercises a certain energy and sagacity,
even the danger which may result from them is relatively slight.

But chance had made of Messalina an empress, and Messalina was not a
sufficiently intelligent or serious w