In the year 29 A.D., soon after the death of the aged Livia, a letter came to the Senate from Tiberius charging Agrippina and her son with various offences, and demanding that they should be formally accused and the matter then referred to himself. At this point there is a gap in the Annals of Tacitus. We do not know what the steps were in the process, or what evidence was brought against the guilty. We gather from other sources that Agrippina was banished to the island of Pandateria, and her son to another island, in which he killed himself after a considerable interval, possibly at the suggestion of his guards. Agrippina disappears from history ‘semper atrox,’ for on her way into exile she was so abusive that the centurion in charge of the party was obliged to impose restraint by force, and in the struggle which ensued the lady lost an eye. The historians are silent as to the previous damage suffered by the centurion. Nor did she abandon her contumacious attitude on arriving at Pandateria. It was necessary to feed her by force, and, in spite of the well-intentioned efforts of her attendants, she is said to have succeeded two years later in dying of starvation. Agrippina was not a woman of any real strength of character; had she honestly revered her husband’s memory, and followed his example, she would not have continued the Julian feud and handed it down to two more generations. It is impossible not to feel some respect for so stout and so reckless a hater, and nobody has ever disputed her claim to certain domestic virtues which were lamentably absent from other ladies of her family, and were certainly sufficiently advertised by herself and her admirers; but in her maternal solicitude she was more pushing than wise, and the evil of her example influenced her children more than the good. The mother of Caligula, the grandmother of Nero, was certainly not fortunate in the traditions which she transmitted to her posterity, and if Nero really did poison his half-brother Britannicus, with the connivance of his mother, the cup may be said to have been mixed by his grandmother.