She sent a freedman of hers called Agermus to tell Nero that she was safe but that he should not visit her, however scared he might have been by the danger she had been in. She was picked up by some boatmen nearby and taken to her villa.Īgrippina had the presence of mind to realize that her best tactic now would be to pretend to believe that the disaster had all been a genuine accident, while keeping Nero at a distance. She was promptly beaten to death under a hail of blows from pikes and oars, while Agrippina dived overboard and swam for it. In the chaos the selfless Acerronia made a futile gesture by insisting that she was Agrippina. The farce continued with the boat’s failure to disintegrate, leaving the crew arguing over how best to make the vessel sink. This failed to kill Agrippina and her servant Acerronia Polla because the bed they were lying in had such high sides. The voyage progressed without incident to begin with until, suddenly, the canopy over Agrippina’s area collapsed, thanks to the lead with which it was roofed. The banquet over, Nero took her to the rigged boat which duly set sail across the Bay of Naples to take her home. But she seems to have settled into the banquet because Nero had her seated in the place of honor as the most important person there.
A rumor circulated that she had smelled a rat and was on her guard, and was carried to Baiae by road rather than any form of boat or ship. Agrippina duly arrived and was taken by Nero to a nearby villa called Bauli for the period of the festival. Any harebrained scheme to kill Agrippina in Rome was bound to be exposed. The pretext would be to present the occasion as an opportunity for mother-son reconciliation, which he had been working on by pretending to be as devoted a son as possible. He was at the time attending a festival of Minerva called the Quinquatrus, held on March at Baiae on the Bay of Naples. Nero was delighted by the idea of the defective boat, whether he or anyone else had thought of it. The exact origins of the idea matter less than the curious subterfuge adopted as a means of avoiding Agrippina’s suspicions. They supposedly saw a ship designed to fall apart during a theatrical performance and used that as their inspiration. Dio believed the plot was primarily one dreamed up by Nero and Seneca, the latter either wanting to divert attention from criticisms about his own behavior or to help accelerate Nero’s downfall.
#NERO S FORM FREE#
Nero would then be free to observe all the usual obsequies and posthumous respect a woman of Agrippina’s status deserved. Clearly, Anicetus promised, no one could possibly suspect Nero because it would “obviously” have been a simple, but tragic, accident. For this mission impossible he came up with the idea of a self-destructing boat which would eject Agrippina into the water. To this he added the useful attribute of an imaginative mind. Anicetus, a freedman who had formerly been Nero’s tutor, was currently serving as the prefect of the imperial fleet at Misenum and loathed Agrippina with a passion. For Nero’s purposes this was perfect: someone else would surely do his dirty work. Fortunately for Nero, Agrippina had left a number of enemies in her wake and some of them nursed murderous resentment in their hearts. Under such circumstances it began to look as if Agrippina was inviolable. The underlying reason for this was the simple fact that Agrippina was the daughter of the famous general Germanicus, a qualification of such exalted esteem that no self-respecting soldier was likely to agree to her murder. A straightforward assault on her with weapons was unlikely to work because not only would it be hard to hide them, but Nero was also worried that anyone ordered to kill Agrippina might refuse. The others say that he rejected any idea of poisoning Agrippina for that very reason, not least because he knew she would realize immediately what was happening anyway. Suetonius says Nero tried three times to poison his mother but abandoned the plan when he discovered Agrippina had fortified herself with antidotes. Had it been dreamed up by a novelist it would be roundly dismissed as a hopelessly implausible and idiotic plot twist. The story of Agrippina’s death is well known, but remains mostly remarkable for the farcical way it was carried out.