But
the emperor, when the crime was at last accomplished, realised its
portentous guilt. The rest of the night, now silent and stupified, now and
still oftener starting up in terror, bereft of reason, he awaited the dawn
as if it would bring with it his doom. He was first encouraged to hope by
the flattery addressed to him, at the prompting of Burrus, by the centurions
and tribunes, who again and again pressed his hand and congratulated him on
his having escaped an unforeseen danger and his mother's daring crime. Then
his friends went to the temples, and, an example having once been set, the
neighbouring towns of
Campania testified their joy
with sacrifices and deputations. He himself, with an opposite phase of
hypocrisy, seemed sad, and almost angry at his own deliverance, and shed
tears over his mother's death. But as the aspects of places change not, as
do the looks of men, and as he had ever before his eyes the dreadful sight
of that sea with its shores (some too believed that the notes of a funereal
trumpet were heard from the surrounding heights, and wailings from the
mother's grave), he retired to
Neapolis and sent a
letter to the Senate, the drift of which was that Agerinus, one of
Agrippina's confidential freedmen, had been detected with the dagger of an
assassin, and that in the consciousness of having planned the crime she had
paid its penalty.