Sublime

When Gaius was acclaimed emperor on Tiberius’ death in 37 CE, he must have seemed like a welcome change. Just twenty-four years old, he had as good a claim to the throne as any Julio-Claudian could hope for. His mother, Agrippina, was the daughter of Julia, and so the granddaughter of Augustus in his direct bloodline. His father, Germanicus – once

Seneca cites with horror and condemnation Caligula’s dreadful words: “Let them hate, as long as they fear”: oderint, dum timeant. 38 His central point is that this degree of aggression goes beyond appropriate expression of authority into the merely monstrous.

Seneca in its grisly humor and in its narcissism—although unlike Seneca, Nero had no loyal wife or family members or friends to stand by his side in death, since he had killed them all.

So Nero decided to kill his mother. Even by the unscrupulous standards of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, this was a radical move and one that would be difficult to pull off. The Roman public, if they discovered the truth, were not likely to treat matricide as an acceptable type of behavior.