of the amazing goodness of Nero, Cardan begs to inquire, what man is there so patient that he could live with the most sweet-tempered woman for four whole years without a quarrel, as Nero did with Poppaa, the most peevish of all women (omnium fœminarum morosissima)?

AGRIPPINA.

I HAVE met with nothing recorded of the person of Agrippina beyond the general praise of her great beauty, which is spoken of in the strongest language by Dion. At the public spectacles, this historian describes her as wearing a cloak interwoven with gold. The Roman people, who appear to have tolerated much of Nero's wickedness, were evidently struck with horror at the murder of his mother; caricatures, rhymes, and satirical pictures were fixed up in public places, reviling the matricide. Nero himself appears to have been distracted by his accusing conscience. He leaped in terror

VOL. I.

Q

from his bed in the night, and was alarmed by the sound of trumpets heard over the spot where she was buried. The murder was preceded by every circumstance of treachery and hypocrisy. On taking leave of his mother on the night when his first attempt at her death by drowning was made, Nero embraced her, says Dion, and kissed her eyes and her hands. The remark which he made on looking at her dead body, says the historian, was more wicked than the murder itself: "I did not know that my mother was so beautiful."*

Of all the lost works of the ancients, the loss most to be deplored is that of the commentaries of Agrippina, to which Tacitus refers as his authority for matters which he had not found elsewhere. He describes the work as a history of her own life, and of the fate of her relations.†

"Hist." lib. LXI, p. 696.

* Dion, καλλην μητέρα είχον.

Ουκ ήδειν οτι ουτω

+"Id ego a scriptoribus annalium non traditum, reperi in commentariis Agrippinæ filiæ; quæ Neronis principis mater, vitam suam et casus suorum posteris memoravit." -Tacitus, Annales, lib. iv, c. 53.

The loss of a work of history is a positive loss of wisdom to the world which cannot be supplied; in the case of a history written by a woman of the great abilities of Agrippina, and who had mingled so much as she had done in scenes of blood and licentiousness, the loss is felt with double acuteness.

POPPAA SABINA.

POPPA SABINA, the mistress and second wife of Nero, according to Tacitus, inherited great beauty from her mother. She had, like her lover, yellow hair; and Nero, who amongst his other accomplishments was a poet, wrote verses in praise of her amber locks (capillos succineos).* The extreme whiteness of her skin, the usual accompaniment of golden hair, she preserved by bathing every day in asses' milk, and wherever she went she had along with her a troop of five hundred she-asses to furnish her bath.t

* Plinius, "Hist. Natur." lib. xxxvII, c. 12. † Ibid. lib. ix, c. 96.