‘Enough!’ she said. ‘Sirs, I have done with you. By the claims of the innocent and the calumniated, if not by the rights of a mother, I demand an interview with my son this very day--this very hour.’ While yet the two ministers, and even the freedmen--in spite of the open scorn which she had manifested towards them--were under the spell of her powerful ascendency, they declared to Nero her complete innocence of the charges laid against her. Relieved from his alarm, Nero came to her. Receiving him with calm dignity, she said not a word about her innocence, which she chose to assume as a matter of course; not a word about the gratitude which he owed to her, lest she should seem to be casting it in his teeth. She only begged for rewards for her friends, and the punishment of her defeated adversaries. Nero was unable to resist her demands. Silana was banished from Italy; Calvisius and Iturius were expelled from Rome; Atimetus was executed. Paris alone was spared, because he was too dear to the Emperor to permit of his being punished. The men for whom Agrippina asked favours were men of honour. Fænius Rufus was made commissioner of the corn market; Arruntius Stella was made superintendent of the games which Nero was preparing to exhibit; the learned Balbillus was made governor of Egypt. Nero was intensely jealous of Rubellius Plautus, but his hour had not yet come. It was the last flash of Agrippina’s dying power, and it encouraged a few to visit her once more. One or two independent senators, pitying her misfortunes, came to salute her, and some of the Roman matrons. Yet among these women there was not one whom she could either respect or trust. She had sinned so deeply in her days of power that women like the younger Arria, wife of Pætus Thrasea, and Servilia, the daughter of Barea Soranus, and Sextia, the mother of Antistius Vetus, held aloof from her. Paulina, the wife of Seneca, cordially disliked her, and the Vestal Virgins had never lent her the countenance of their private friendship.