ly marriages of which we have spoken in the first of these
studies. Agrippina had early arranged an alliance with a young lady
who, because of her virtues, nobility of ancestry, and Roman education,
might have become his worthy companion; but a year after his elevation
to the imperial dignity, the eighteen-year-old youth made the
acquaintance of a woman whose beauty inflamed his senses and
imagination to the point of making him entirely forget Octavia, whom he
had married from a sense of duty and not for love. This person was
Acte, a beautiful Asiatic freedwoman, and the inexperienced, ardent
youth, already given up to exotic fancies, became so enamoured that he
one day proposed to repudiate Octavia and to marry Acte. But a
marriage between Nero and Acte was not possible. The _Lex de
maritandis ordinibus_ prohibited marriages between senators and
freedwomen. It was therefore natural that Agrippina should have
opposed it with all her strength. She, the great-granddaughter of
Livia, the granddaughter of Drusus, the daughter of Germanicus,
educated in the strictest ideas of the old Roman aristocracy, could not
permit her son to compromise the prestige of the entire nobility in the
eyes of the lower orders by so scandalous a _mesalliance_. But on this
occasion the youth, carried away by his passion, resisted. If he did
not actually repudiate Octavia, he disregarded her, and began to live
with Acte as if she were his wife. Agrippina insisted that he give up
this scandalous relationship; but in vain. The mother and son
disagreed, and very shortly after having resisted his mother in the
case of Acte, Nero began to resist her on other occasions. With
increasing energy he shook off maternal authority, which up to that
time he had accepted with docility.

This, however, was a crisis which was sooner or later inevitable.
Agrippina had certainly made the mistake of attempting to treat Nero
the emperor too much as she had treated Nero the child; but that the
crisis should have been reached in this manner as the result of a
love-affair, and that it should have provoked a misunderstanding
between the mother and son that was soon to degenerate into hatred, was
most unfortunate. Agrippina, though she enjoyed great prestige, had
also many hidden enemies. Everybody knew that she represented in the
government the old aristocratic, conservative, and economical tendency
of the Claudii,--of Tiberius and of Drusus,--that she looke