Her career from the
very cradle had been a career of wickedness, nor had any one of the many
fierce vicissitudes of her life called forth in her a single noble or
amiable trait. Born at Oppidum Ubiorum (afterwards called in her honour
Colonia Agrippina, and still retaining its name in the form Cologne),
she lost her father at the age of three, and her mother (by banishment)
at the age of twelve. She was educated with bad sisters, with a wild and
wicked brother, and under a grandmother whom she detested. At the age of
fourteen she was married to Cnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, one of the most
worthless and ill-reputed of the young Roman nobles of his day. The
gossiping biographies of the time still retain some anecdotes of his
cruelty and selfishness. 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.
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