ss and cruelty! You are
looking upon Nero!

Not only is this man an exact type of the ancient civilization, its
central power, its outside beauty, but the precise time of this sketch
of ours is the exact climax of the _moral_ results of the ancient
civilization. We are to look at Nero just when he has returned to Rome
from a Southern journey.[9] That journey had one object, which
succeeded. To his after-life it gives one memory, which never dies. He
has travelled to his beautiful country palace, that he might kill his
mother!

We can picture to ourselves Agrippina, by knowing that she was Nero's
mother, and our picture will not fail in one feature. She has all the
beauty of sense, all the attraction of passion. Indeed, she is the
Empress of Rome, because she is queen of beauty--and of lust. She is
most beautiful among the beautiful of Rome; but what is that beauty of
feature in a state of whose matrons not one is virtuous, of whose
daughters not one is chaste? It is the beauty of sense alone, fit
adornment 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!"[10]

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.