e.

The life of Octavia, lofty as her position was in respect to earthly
grandeur, had been one of uninterrupted suffering and sorrow. She
had been married to Nero when a mere child, and during the whole
period of her connection with her husband he had treated her with
continual unkindness and neglect. She had at length been cruelly
divorced from him, and banished from her native city on charges of
the most ignominious nature, though wholly false--and before this
last accusation was made against her there seemed to be nothing
before her but the prospect of spending the remainder of her days in
a miserable and hopeless exile. Still she clung to life, and when
the messengers of Nero came to tell her that she must die, she was
overwhelmed with agitation and terror.

She begged and implored them with tears and agony, to spare her
life. She would never, she said, give the emperor any trouble, or
interfere in any way with any of his plans. She gave up willingly
all claims to being his wife, and would always consider herself as
only his sister. She would live in retirement and seclusion in any
place where Nero might appoint her abode, and would never occasion
him the slightest uneasiness whatever. The executioners cut short
these entreaties by seizing the unhappy princess in the midst of
them, binding her limbs with thongs, and opening her veins. She
fainted, however, under this treatment, and when the veins were
opened the wretched victim lay passive and insensible in the hands
of her executioners, and the blood would not flow. So they carried
her to a steam-bath which happened to be in readiness near at hand,
and shutting her up in it, left her to be suffocated by the vapor.

Thus the great crowning crime of Nero's life,--for the murder of
Agrippina, the adulterous marriage with Poppaea, and the subsequent
murder of Octavia, are to be regarded as constituting one single
though complicated crime,--was consummate and complete. It was a
crime of the highest possible atrocity. To open the way to an
adulterous marriage by the deliberate and cruel murder of a mother,
and then to seal and secure it by murdering an innocent
wife,--blackening her memory at the same time with an ignominy
wholly undeserved, constitute a crime which for unnatural and
monstrous enormity must be considered as standing at the head of all
that human depravity has ever achieved.

Nero gradually recovered from the remorse and horror with which the
commi