[Footnote 22: Milton, _Paradise Regained_, iv. 128. For a picture of
Tiberius as he appeared in his old age at Capreae, "hated of all and
hating," see Id. 90-97.]
Caius Caesar was the son of Germanicus and the elder Agrippina.
Germanicus was the bravest and most successful general, and one of the
wisest and most virtuous men, of his day. His wife Agrippina, in her
fidelity, her chastity, her charity, her nobility of mind, was the very
model of a Roman matron of the highest and purest stamp. Strange that
the son of such parents should have been one of the vilest, cruelest,
and foulest of the human race. So, however, it was; and it is a
remarkable fact that scarcely one of the six children of this marriage
displayed the virtues of their father and mother, while two of them,
Caius Caesar and the younger Agrippina, lived to earn an exceptional
infamy by their baseness and their crimes. Possibly this unhappy result
may have been partly due to the sad circumstances of their early
education. Their father, Germanicus, who by his virtue and his successes
had excited the suspicious jealousy of his uncle Tiberius, was by his
distinct connivance, if not by his actual suggestion, atrociously
poisoned in Syria.
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