Although there is no writing of Agrippina's extant, we do have what purports to be the speech in her defence which she made when accused by Junia Silana with a design of inciting Plautus to effect a change in the State, and, by marrying him, to regain her power in the commonwealth, which Nero had taken out of her hands. In it all we see nothing but the backbitings of two rancorous old women; but it was represented to Nero as a horrible affair. Nero's fears were so excited that it was with difficulty that he could be induced to allow his mother to survive until morning and have an opportunity to make her own defence. We have her speech as it is given by Tacitus. Possibly it is the historian's own composition; but it is exactly what we might expect from the fierce old empress-mother. And as it is certain that Seneca and Burrhus, to whom it was addressed, would have with them shorthand writers, it is not improbable that Tacitus took it from the official records. "I wonder not," said Agrippina, "that Silana, who never bore a child, should be a stranger to the affections of a mother; for, in truth, children are not so easily renounced by their parents, as adulterers are changed by a profligate. Nor, because Iturius and Calvisus, after having consumed their whole fortunes, as a last resource pay back to an old woman their services in undertaking my accusation, as an equivalent for their hire, does it follow that I am to be branded with the infamy, or that Cæsar should conceive the guilt of parricide. As to Domitia, I would thank her for all the efforts of her enmity to me, if she strove to exceed me in kindness to her nephew, my Nero. At present, by the ministration of Atimetus, her minion, and the merry-andrew Paris, she is framing a farce to fit for the stage. Where was she when I by my counsels obtained the adoption of her nephew and my son into the Claudian house? when I advanced his cause in every way necessary for getting him the Empire?--Admiring her fishponds at Baiæ." If this is Agrippina's composition, there is certainly no lack of force in it and she was preëminently an adept in the use of innuendo. We would like to have seen those _Memoirs_.