Now Nero in an edict stated that Octavia, in hopes of engaging the fleet in her conspiracy, had corrupted Anicetus the admiral. And forgetting that he had just before accused her of barrenness, he added, that in guilty consciousness of her lust, she had produced abortion, and that all these were clearly proved to him. And he confined her in the island Pandataria. Never was there any exile who touched the hearts of the beholders with deeper compassion; some there were who still remembered to have seen Agrippina banished by Tiberius; the more recent sufferings of Julia were likewise recalled to mind, confined there by Claudius: but they had experienced some happiness, and the recollection of their former splendour proved some alleviation of their present horrors. To Octavia, in the first place, the day of her nuptials was in place of a funeral day, being brought under a roof where she encountered nothing but memorials of woe; her father cut off by poison, and soon afterwards her brother; then a handmaid more influential than her mistress; Poppæa wedded to her husband, only to bring destruction on his lawful wife--and lastly, a crime laid to her charge more intolerable than death in any shape. And this young lady, in her twentieth year, thrown among centurions and common soldiers, and already bereft of life under the presage of impending woes, did not, however, as yet enjoy the repose of death. After an interval of a few days she was ordered to die, when she protested,“she was now a widow, and only the emperor’s sister”; appealed to the Germanici, the common relatives of Nero and herself; and lastly invoked the name of Agrippina, observing, “that had she lived, her marriage-state would have been made wretched, but she would not have been doomed to destruction.” She was then tied fast with bonds, and her veins opened in every joint; and her death was accelerated by the vapour of a bath, heated to the highest point. A deed of still more atrocious brutality was added; her head was cut off and conveyed to the city for Poppæa to see it. Offerings at the temples were decreed by the fathers on account of these events; a circumstance which I have recorded in order that that all those who shall read the calamities of those times, as they are delivered by me or any other authors, may conclude by anticipation, that as often as a banishment or a murder was perpetrated by the prince’s orders, so often thanks were rendered to the gods; and those acts which in former times were resorted to to distinguish prosperous occurrences, were now made the tokens of public disasters. Still I will not suppress the mention of any decree of the senate which is marked by unheard-of adulation, or the extremity of abject servility.