And Lollia Paulina? What might she not have done with her enormous riches? Agrippina could recall her--not at one of the great Court gatherings, but at an ordinary marriage supper, in which she had appeared in a dress embroidered from head to foot with alternate rows of pearls and emeralds, with emeralds in her hair, emeralds of deepest lustre on her fingers, a carcanet of emeralds--the finest Rome had ever seen--around her neck. Yet this was not her best dress, and her jewels were said to be worth eighty millions of sesterces.[2] She remembered with what a stately step, with what a haughty countenance the great heiress, who had for a short time been Empress as wife of Caligula, passed among the ranks of dazzled courtiers, with the revenues of a province upon her robes. Well, she had dared to be a competitor with Agrippina for the hand of Claudius. It required no small skill to avert the deeply seated Roman prejudice against the union of an uncle with his niece; yet Agrippina had won --thanks to the freedman Pallas, and to other things. She procured the banishment of Lollia, and soon afterwards a tribune was sent and she was bidden to kill herself. The countenance of the thinker darkened for a moment as she remembered the evening when the tribune had returned, and had taken out of its casket the terrible proof that her vengeance was accomplished. How unlike was that ghastly relic to the head whose dark locks had been wreathed with emeralds! And Domitia Lepida, her sister-in-law, the mother of the Empress Messalina, the aunt of her son Nero, the former wife of her own husband, Crispus Passienus? She was wealthy as herself, beautiful as herself, noble as herself, unscrupulous as herself. She might have been a powerful ally, but how dared she to compete for the affections of Nero? How dared she to be indulgent when Agrippina was severe? The boy had been brought up in her house when his father was dead and his mother an exile. His chances had seemed very small then, and Lepida had so shamefully neglected him that his only tutors were a barber and a dancer. But now that he held the glorious position of Prince of the Roman Youth; now that he wore the manly toga, while Britannicus only stood in humble boy’s dress--the embroidered robe, and the golden bulla round his neck to avert the evil eye; now that it seemed probable to all that Nero, the adopted son of Claudius, would be the future Emperor instead of Britannicus, his real son, it was all very well for Domitia to fondle and pamper him. It was a hard matter to get rid of Lepida, for Narcissus, the faithful guardian of Claudius, had opposed the attempt to get her put to death. Nevertheless, Agrippina seldom failed in her purposes; and as for Lepida and Narcissus--their turn might come!