He had entered the world like a tiger cub, feet first; a
circumstance which is said to have disturbed his mother, and well
it might. During his adolescence that lady made herself feared. He
was but seventeen when the pretorians called upon him to rule the
world; and at the time an ingenuous lad, one who blushed like
Lalage, very readily, particularly at the title of Father of the
Country, which the senate was anxious to give him; endowed with
excellent instincts, which he had got no one knew whence; a trifle
petit maitre, perhaps, perfuming the soles of his feet, and
careful about the arrangement of his yellow curls, but withal
generous, modest, sympathetic--in short, a flower in a cesspool, a
youth not over well-fitted to reign. But his mother was there; as
he developed so did his fear of her, to such proportions even that
he gave certain orders, and his mother was killed. That duel
between mother and son, terrible in its intensity and unnameable
horror, even the Borgias could not surpass. Tacitus has told it,
dramatically, as was his wont, but he told it in Latin, in which
tongue it had best remain.
At that time the ingenuous lad had disappeared. The cub was full-
grown. Besides, he had tasted blood. Octavia, who with her
brother, Britannicus, and her sister, Antonia, had been his
playmates; who was almost his own sister; whose earliest memories
interlinked with his, and who had become his wife, had been put to
death; not that she had failed to please, but because a lady,
Sabina Poppoea, who, Tacitus says, lacked nothing except virtue,
had declined to be his mistress.
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