At first, like one dazed with a sudden outburst of light, he had been unable to understand the immensity of his own power. For the first month of his reign he could hardly realise that he was more than a boy. He had always been passionately fond of chariot races, which as a boy he had not been permitted to frequent. One day, while at his lessons, he had been deploring to his companions the fate of a charioteer of the green faction who had been thrown out of his chariot and dragged to death by his own horses. His master, overhearing the conversation, reproved him, and the boy, with a clever and ready lie, said, ‘I was only talking about Hector being dragged round the walls of Troy by Achilles.’ And now he might watch the races all day long and plunge into the hottest rivalry of the factions, and neither in this pursuit nor in any other was there a single human being to say him nay. The only thing which troubled him was the jealous interference of his mother. Agrippina still clutched with desperate tenacity at the vanishing fruits of the ambition for the sake of which all her crimes had been committed. She had sold her soul, and was beating back the conviction that she had sold it for nought. How could that slight boy of seventeen, whom as a child she had so often chastised with her own hand, dream of resisting her? Was not her nature, compared with his, as adamant to clay? She had been a princess of the blood from infancy, surrounded by near relatives who had been adored in life and deified after death; she had enjoyed power during two reigns, and now at last she had fancied that she would control the Empire for the remainder of her life. Was not her skill in intrigue as great as that of Livia? Was not her indomitable purpose even more intense? She forgot that Livia had been, what Caligula called her, _Ulysses stolatus_, ‘a Ulysses in petticoats,’ a woman with absolute control over her own emotions. Agrippina, on the other hand, was full of a wild passion which ruined her caution and precipitated her end. And she forgot, more fatally, the total collapse of all Livia’s soaring ambitions. Livia had procured the death of prince after prince who stood between her son Tiberius and the throne. Tiberius did indeed become Emperor, but ‘had Zimri peace who slew his master’? Pliny calls Tiberius ‘confessedly the gloomiest of men.’ He himself wrote to the Senate that he felt himself daily destroyed by all the gods and goddesses. And, after all, his only son died, and he was succeeded by Caligula, the bad and brutal son of the hated and murdered Germanicus and the hated and murdered Agrippina the elder. He might have said with the bloodstained usurper of our great tragedy:-- ‘Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown, And put a barren sceptre in my gripe; Thence to be wrench’d with an unlineal hand, No son of mine succeeding.’ Was it likely to be otherwise with her son Nero?