Her first husband was Rufius Crispinus, by whom she had a son. She had accepted the advances of Otho, who passed for the finest of the young Roman aristocrats; but she aimed from the first at becoming Empress, and it was with this aim that she had flung her spells over Nero. Her consummate beauty was enhanced by the utmost refinements of a coquette. She pretended to love Nero passionately for his own sake, as though she had become enamoured of his personal beauty; yet while she thus allured his devotion, she carefully checked his advances with a bewitching semblance of modesty. She played the part of the honourable Roman matron. She extolled the open-handed liberality and artistic grace of Otho. She taunted Nero with his love for a freedwoman like Acte. Above all, she missed no opportunity of deepening his irritation against his mother. She saw the instinctive fear of Agrippina which Nero could never quite throw off, and feeling convinced that so long as the Empress-mother lived she could not supplant Octavia, she made it her aim to goad Nero to her murder or banishment. Whenever she saw him most enraptured with her charms--when his hand wandered to the golden tresses, full of burning gleams in the sunlight, which Nero had astonished the poets by describing as ‘amber-hued,’ and which were the despair and envy of the Roman ladies--she would push his hand aside, and tell him that she was much happier as the wife of Otho than she could be in a palace where her lover was still subject to the maternal sway of one who detested her. Nero became haunted by the fixed impression that he could never be free and never be happy while Agrippina lived. Poppæa did not even hesitate to taunt him. ‘You a Cæsar!’ she said. ‘Why, you are not even a free man! You are still a schoolboy tied to your mother’s girdle!’