rity, but an act of political
sagacity planned by a woman whose knowledge of the art of government
had been received in the school of Augustus.

[Illustration: Agrippina the Younger.]

The move was entirely successful. The illusion that the imperial
authority was only a transitory expedient made necessary by the civil
wars, and that it might one day be entirely abolished, was still deeply
grounded in the Roman aristocracy. Every relaxation of authority was
specially pleasing to the senatorial circles. The government of Nero
therefore began under the most favorable auspices, with joyous hope in
the general promise of concord. The disaffection which had been felt
in the last six years of Claudius's government was changed into a
general and confident optimism, which the first acts of the new
government and the signs of the future seemed to justify. Agrippina
continued to keep Nero subject to her authority, as she had done before
the election: together with his two masters, Seneca and Burrhus, she
suggested to him every word and deed. The senate resumed its ancient
functions; and governed by Seneca, Burrhus, and Agrippina in
conjunction with the senate, the empire seemed to be progressing
wonderfully, and in the eyes of the senators the entire government was
in a better way than it ever yet had been.

But the situation soon changed. Agrippina, to be sure, had given her
son a strictly Roman education, and had brought him up with a
simplicity and rigor long since out of fashion; and though she had
early given him a wife, she continued to keep him subject to maternal
authority. But, with all this, it is doubtful if there ever was a
temperament which rebelled against this species of education as
strongly as did Nero's. His taste for the arts of drawing and singing,
the indifference which he had shown for the study of oratory from his
childhood, these were the seeds from which as time went on his raging
exoticism was to be developed through the use and abuse of power. His
was one of those rioting, contrary, and undisciplined temperaments
which feel that they must do precisely the opposite of what tradition,
education, and the general opinion of the society in which they live
have prescribed as necessary and recognized as lawful. In the case of
Nero the defects and the dangers in the ancient Roman education were to
become apparent.

The first of these dangers declared itself when Nero entered upon one
of those ear