, Anicetus accepted. The freedman whom Agrippina
had sent to announce her misfortune was imprisoned and put in chains,
in order to convey the impression that he had been captured carrying
concealed weapons and in the act of making an attempt upon the
emperor's life by the order of his mother. Anicetus then hastened to
the villa of Agrippina and surrounded it with a body of sailors. He
entered the house, and with two officers rushed into the room where
Agrippina, reclining upon a couch, was talking with a servant, and
killed her. Tacitus tells us that when Agrippina saw one of the
officers unsheathe his sword, she asked him to thrust her through the
body which had borne her son.

Thus died the last woman of the house of Augustus, and, with the
exception of Livia, the most remarkable feminine figure in that family.
She died like a soldier, on duty and at her post, bravely defending the
social and political traditions of the Roman aristocracy and the
time-honored principles of Romanism against the influx of those new
forces of a later age which were seeking to orientalize the ancient
Latin republic. She died for her family, for her caste, and for Rome,
without even having the reward of being remembered with dutiful regard
by posterity; for in this struggle she had sacrificed not merely her
life, but even her honor and her fame. Such, furthermore, was the
common destiny of all the members of this family, and if we except
Livia and Augustus, the privileged pair who founded it, we are at a
loss to know whether to call it the most fortunate or the most unhappy
of all the families of the ancient world. It is impossible for the
historian who understands this terrible drama, filled with so many
catastrophes, not to feel a certain impression of horror at the
vindictive ferocity that Rome showed to this house, which, in order to
bring back Rome's peace and to preserve her empire, had been fated to
exalt itself a few degrees above the ordinary level of the ancient
aristocracy. Men and women, the young and the old, the knaves and the
large-hearted, the sages and the fools of the family, alike, all
without exception, were persecuted and plotted against. And again, if
we except the persons of the two founders, and those who, like Drusus
and Germanicus, had the good fortune to die young, Rome deprived them
all, deprived even Antonia, of either their life or their greatness or
their honor, and not infrequently it robbed them of