In the year 38 he married the notorious Valeria Messalina, whose name conveys to every student of history or morals a summary impression of the worst features of the early Empire. The spirit of our time is so resolutely bent on visiting the sins of the children on their fathers--so determined to seek the secret of character in heredity--that the older biographical practice of drawing out genealogies cannot be entirely abandoned; though one may wonder whether the tainted atmosphere of Rome may not have been more deadly than a tainted stock. It is enough to say that both her parents were of the Julian family, and were first cousins of Claudius. Her father, Valerius Messala Barbatus, was a Senator of distinction. He is known to us as the Senator who, in the old Roman spirit, made a futile effort to restrain women from invading public life and the camp. Her mother has a less reputable record. We shall see that she eventually falls under a charge of conspiracy and magic; but we may find that her more serious offence was an intense hatred of the Empress Agrippina, who brought the charge against her. Messalina, as we may now briefly call her--with a passing protest against that uncouth expression, “the Messaline”--was in her sixteenth year at the time of her marriage. An indulgent imagination will be able to appreciate the dangerous situation of the young girl. Entering, in her teens, a world of the most seductive pleasure and the utmost license, with so responsive and impulsive a nature as she had, she needed the guidance of a man whom she could at least respect. Instead of this, she found herself mated to a man of forty-eight years, whose full paunch and long thin legs and tremulous head were the jest of the Palatine, and who spent his hours in the company of Greek freedmen, or in too prolonged an enjoyment of rich dishes and costly wines. Claudius, it is true, adored her, but his adoration only made him the surer dupe of her craving for indulgence. Her misconduct probably began early. When, after the evening meal, she left her spouse intoxicated and snoring over the emptied dishes, when his throat had been tickled with a feather, so that he might disgorge and return to the Imperial dainties, the young girl would naturally yield to the counsels of the unscrupulous courtiers who abounded in such a palace.