Nero--slight boy as she thought him--had hardly been seated on the throne when he began to slip out of her control. Pallas, her secret lover, her chief supporter, was speedily ejected and disgraced. Seneca and Burrus were both opposed to her influence, and neither of them dreaded her vengeance. Suitors for favours were more anxious to secure the intercession of Acte than hers. Nero, surrounded by dissolute young aristocrats, and also by adventurers, buffoons and parasites, was daily showing himself more indifferent to her threats, her commands, even her reasonable wishes. He liked to parade his new-born freedom. She felt sure that among the circle of his familiar companions, she and her pretensions were turned into ridicule. Her proud cheek flushed even in solitude to think that she, who, for Nero’s sake, had dared all, should have been superseded in her influence by such curled and jewelled weaklings as Otho, and ousted from her son’s affections by a meek freedwoman like Acte. How terribly had she miscalculated! In the reign of Claudius she had been the mightiest person in the Court and in the State. Had she become the murderess of her husband only to transfer from herself into the hands of men whom she despised too much to hate, the power which was once her own? Had she flung away the substance and only grasped a flickering shadow? A thousand plans of revenge crossed her mind, only to be rejected. The die was cast. The deeds done were irrevocable. It only remained for her to dree the judgment for her crimes, and to take such few steps as still were possible to her along the precipice’s edge. She had plucked a tempting fruit, and she found that its taste was poison; she had nursed a serpent in her bosom, and its sting was death. But she would not resign her power without at least one mad struggle to retain it. She still had access to the Emperor whenever she desired, and many a wild scene had occurred between the mother and the son. In such interviews she let her tongue run riot. She refrained from nothing. She no longer attempted to conceal from him that Claudius had died by her hand. She wrapped the youth round in the whirlwind of her sulphurous passion; she raised her voice so loud in a storm of reproaches and recriminations that sometimes even the freedmen and soldiers outside the imperial apartments heard the fierce voices of altercation, and were in doubt whether they should not rush in and interfere. And often the feeble nature of Nero cowered before her menaces as she poured on him a flood of undisguised contempt. Sometimes she wrapped him in a storm of satire and sarcasm. She upbraided him with his unmanliness; she contrasted him unfavourably with Britannicus; she told him that he was more fit to be an actor of melodrama, or a tenth-rate charioteer, or a fiftieth-rate singer, than to be the Emperor of Rome.