Agrippina, devoured with chagrin and resentment, had indeed been asked to accompany him, but in a way so insultingly ungracious, that she declined. She dreaded to share with him a place so retired, in which she knew that almost every hour would fill her with disgust and anger. She had chosen instead to go alone to her stately villa at Bauli, on the Campanian shore. There, if she had little else to occupy her time, she could continue her own memoirs, or amuse herself with the lampreys and mullets, which were so tame that they would come at her call, and feed out of her hand. Her husband’s mother, Antonia, had attached earrings to one pet lamprey, so that people used to visit the villa to see it. Agrippina followed her example. Octavia followed Nero. She had not been suffered to possess any villa which she could call her own, and much as Nero would have liked to leave her behind, he was compelled by public opinion to observe a certain conventional respect for his Empress, the daughter of Claudius. The sedan in which she travelled was carried by eight stalwart Bithynian porters, but she was not honoured with any splendour or observance, and had only a modest retinue out of her six hundred nominal attendants. Still humbler was the following of Britannicus. He had been bidden to come partly because it would have seemed shameful to leave him alone in Rome during an unhealthy season, when even persons of low position were driven into the country by the month in which Libitina claimed her most numerous victims; and also because Nero was glad to keep him in sight. He was happy enough, for Titus was with him, and Pudens was one of the escort; and as Epaphroditus necessarily attended his master, Nero, it was not difficult to get leave for Epictetus to come in his train. The two kind-hearted boys thought that the pale face of the slave-child might gain a touch of rose from the fresh winds of the Apennines.