For a moment they stopped before her imperious gesture.
‘If you have come from my son to inquire after my health,’ she said, ‘tell him that I am better. If you have come to commit a crime, I will not believe that you have his authority.’
‘We have his authority,’ said Anicetus. ‘Behold his signet-ring!’
They advanced upon her. She sprang from her couch and stood erect. Then the brutal Herculeius struck her a blow on the head with his baton, and Anicetus aimed his sword at her breast. She avoided the stroke, and, rending her tunic, ‘Strike here,’ she said, pointing to her womb; ‘it bore a monster!’
She fell, stricken down, and thrust through with many deadly wounds.
Thus ended that career of wickedness and splendour. Almost from the day which consummated her many crimes she heard behind her the fatal footstep of the avenger. Her murder of Claudius had placed the diadem upon the brow of her own murderer. For that young murderer she had felt the frantic love of a tigress for the cub which she licks and fondles. And now the tiger-whelp had shown the nature which it inherited.
When Nero received the news that his mother was dead, he would not trust to any testimony. With wild haste and utmost secrecy he went to the villa at Bauli. With trembling hand he drew the winding-sheet from the face, and gazed on the corpse. The colour fled from his cheeks; but after a moment or two he grew bolder. The matricide was still the æsthete. ‘I did not know,’ he said, ‘that I had so beautiful a mother.’ Then he hurried back.
That same night they carried her corpse to the funeral pyre. It was laid upon a couch from her banquet-hall, for lack of a regular bier. Hurried and scant and humble were her obsequies. Her ashes were laid in a mean grave near the road to Misenum, where the villa of the dictator Cæsar crowned an eminence which commanded a wide view of the gulf.
During the remaining ten years of her son’s reign, the site of her sepulchre was left unhonoured and no mound was raised above her ashes. But the spot was not forgotten, and to this day the peasant points to the Sepolcro d’ Agrippina. One instance of faithfulness gave a yet more pathetic interest to the spot where so many lofty hopes were quenched in blood. Before the pyre was kindled, Mnester, her loyal freedman, stabbed himself over her corpse. He would not survive a mistress who, whatever had been her crimes, had been kind to him, and whom he loved.