The turbulent ambition of Agrippina was causing serious misgivings. When the senators were summoned to meet in the Palace she contrived to sit behind a curtain and hear all their deliberations. When Nero was about to receive the Armenian ambassadors she would have scandalised the majesty of Rome by taking her seat unbidden beside him on the throne, if Seneca had not had the presence of mind to whisper to the Emperor that he should step down to meet his mother and lead her to a seat. Worse than this, she had ordered the murder, not only of Narcissus, but of the noble Junius Silanus, whose brother, the affianced suitor of Octavia before her marriage with Nero, she had already got rid of by false accusations which broke his heart. She was doubly afraid of Junius, both because the blood of Augustus flowed in his veins, and because she feared that he might one day be the avenger of his brother, though he was a man of mild disposition. She sent the freedman Helius and the knight Publius Celer, who were procurators in Asia, to poison him at a banquet, and the deed was done with a cynical boldness which disdained concealment. So ended the great-great-grandson of Augustus, whom his great-great-grandfather had just lived to see. It was only with difficulty that Seneca and Burrus had been able to stop more tragedies, and they had succeeded in making the world believe in Nero’s unique clemency by the anecdote, everywhere retailed by Seneca, that when called upon to sign a death-warrant he had exclaimed, ‘I wish I did not know how to write!’ It was looked on as a further sign of grace that he had forbidden the prosecution of the knight Julius Densus, who was charged with favour towards the wronged Britannicus. But now a new trouble had arisen. Nero began to seek the company of such effeminate specimens of the ‘gilded youth’ of Rome as Otho and Tullius Senecio. They were his ready tutors in every vice, and he was a pupil whose fatal aptitude soon equalled, if it did not surpass, the viciousness of his instructors.