a combination of symptoms, and a sequence of events, 
that two thousand years later would speak for themselves. 
Our sources say that a curtain of secrecy had shrouded 
the palace during the illness of Claudius. It is tempting 
to try to reconstruct the scenes in the imperial palace 
before and during the crime. The plot had been laid 
earlier in whispered conversations between Agrippina 
and Locusta in some safe spot to which Locusta had 
been furtively summoned. How stirred Locusta must 
have been by her great assignment: the world offered 
none bigger for a person in her line of work. Locusta, 
if she possessed imagination as well as art, may well have 
leaped with excitement at the thought that this deed, 
artfully accomplished, would bring her immortality ; and 
indeed it has done so. But during that fateful night the 
tension must have been unbearable. Had their victim 
foiled their efforts prematurely from drunkenness, by 
vomiting before the poisonous amanita had done its 
damage’ Might he survive and resume the exercise of 
imperial functions! Was Locusta vexed, her professional 
pride hurt, when Nenophon was called in, or was she 
relieved’ With what anxious eyes Locusta and Agrip- 
pina must have searched each other’s ill-lighted faces as 
the hours crept on! But in any case, with his enemies 
in command at his bedside, Claudius stood no chance. 
The triumph of Agrippina and her fellow conspirators 
bestowed on them all power. They may well have gloated 
in their success, and were so situated that they could talk 
with a large measure of impunity. In the writings of 
Seneca and the three historians, one seems to hear echoes 
of veiled boasting, as though Locusta and Agrippina 
were dying to tell just how they had contrived their ends. 
Their words were veiled, in homage to virtue, but thinly, 
and lend themselves to understanding by the initiated, 
if only across a chasm of nineteen centuries. 
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