They tell us how he once, without the slightest remorse, ran over a poor boy who was playing on the Appian Road; how on another occasion he knocked out the eye of a Roman knight who had given him a hasty answer; and how, when his friend congratulated him on the birth of his son (the young Claudius Domitius, afterwards the Emperor Nero), he brutally remarked that from people like himself and Agrippina could only be born some monster destined for the public ruin.
Domitius was forty years old when he married Agrippina, and the young Nero was not born till nine years afterwards.

Whatever there was of possible affection in the tigress-nature of Agrippina was now absorbed in the person of her child.

For that child, from its cradle to her own death by his means, she toiled and sinned.

The fury of her own ambition, inextricably linked with the uncontrollable fierceness of her love for this only son, henceforth directed every action of her life.

Destiny had made her the sister of one Emperor; intrigue elevated her into the wife of another; her own crimes made her the mother of a third.