And so they were in this case. In the year 18 A.D., Germanicus and Piso started, one after the other, at a short interval of time, for the East, but they lost no time in coming to loggerheads. The first incident occurred at Athens, which first Germanicus, and then Piso, made a stage in the journey. Germanicus, who was an ardent admirer of Greek culture, had wished to do honour in every possible way to the great city in which the fire of ancient culture had burned with the most dazzling brightness. He had entered Athens almost like a private person, with only one lictor in attendance; and had exchanged the most flowery and amiable speeches with the magistrates of the city. This attitude, however, had seemed too affable to a Roman of the old stamp, like Piso, who considered that the representative of the power of Rome ought never to repose too great authority and confidence in the subject nations and cities, even if they called themselves Greece and Athens, and could pride themselves on having listened to Socrates and on having been the first to applaud the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. So Piso also stopped at Athens, but with the object of cancelling by a brusque and harsh demeanour the impression which might have been made by the imprudent affability of Germanicus. He, in his turn, made a speech, full of stern reproof and almost veiled threats to the Athenians, which seemed to everybody to be a disavowal of the speeches of Germanicus; as if Piso intended to convey to the people of Athens that Germanicus had spoken on his own account and not in the name of the Roman government. Germanicus was an impressionable young man, but really kind-hearted and conciliatory. He did not take, in bad part, the kind of disavowal which Piso had inflicted on him, all the more because he knew that Piso was the mouthpiece of a perhaps harsh version of the admonitions of Tiberius’s experienced wisdom. Round Germanicus, however, there stood a large party of flatterers and intriguers who had fixed on him as the future emperor—Tiberius was already an old man—; also, Germanicus had to wife Agrippina, a virtuous and highly educated woman, who loved and admired him intensely, but was at the same time very ambitious, passionate, and uncritical, prone to mistake for just and wise everything which appeased her ardent and not ungenerous passions. Piso was accompanied to the East by his wife, Plancina, a great friend of Livia, Tiberius’s mother, and a great enemy of Agrippina. The interested flatteries of friends, the fiery temperament of Agrippina, her blind love for her husband, and her hatred for Plancina, in a short time transformed into a violent personal conflict what Tiberius had intended to be a discreet collaboration between a man of ripe age and experience, and a young man full of good intentions but at times lacking in ballast.