It was, however, exceedingly desirable to get Agrippina away from the armies on the Rhine, and Germanicus himself at the time of the mutiny seems already to have had misgivings as to her influence, for when the soldiers demanded that she and Caligula should return to the camp, he granted their demand so far as the boy was concerned, but found an excuse of an interesting and domestic nature for removing his wife to a distance. She did not return to the army till the mutiny was finally suppressed, but before the expected event had happened. Even Tacitus admits on more than one occasion that Agrippina was a lady of somewhat excitable temperament, and the virtues to which she laid ostentatious claim, and which were universally ascribed to her, are not incompatible with a restless ambition. She was a devoted wife, and even as a widow maintained a reputation for “impenetrable” chastity. She was the very pink and pattern of Roman matrons, but there was nothing in this to prevent her from attempting to push the fortunes of her husband and children in ways of which the former disapproved. In the last year of the Rhine campaigns of Germanicus she temporarily took command during her husband’s absence. Owing to a reverse which had just been sustained the authorities at headquarters proposed to destroy the bridge across the Rhine, a measure which would have cut off the retreat of the Roman legions as effectively as it would have prevented an invasion of Germans. Agrippina resisted this pusillanimous counsel; she did more, she took up her position at the end of the bridge and praised and thanked the legions as they returned. Nobody can fail to admire the womanly kindness which impelled her to clothe the ragged soldiers and poultice the wounded, but we may pardon Tiberius for complaining that she had forgotten her position when she inspected the companies and stood by the standards, and for seeing something more than an exaggerated maternal pride in the dress of Caligula and the wish that he should be called Cæsar, a something more than mere kindness in her freehanded gifts to the private soldiers. Agrippina was not an intriguer, she was too boisterous, too self-confident for intrigue; but she was none the less dangerous: a woman of rights, conjugal rights, maternal rights, ancestral rights; an injured woman, the daughter of an injured mother, a woman whose virtues it is pleasantest to contemplate when exhibited in the bosom of another man’s family. Tiberius did not take her sufficiently seriously; on the whole he seems to have been amused by her, only taking action when action was imperatively necessary. He did not take sufficiently into account the power for mischief which a good-hearted wrong-headed woman of this description may become when her grievances have been taken up by others, and when more subtle intriguers have seen in her a useful tool.