murder. ‘Tacitus, in contrast to Suetonius, is evidently 
convinced of the correctness of his report. In his own 
judgment, he does not report rumors but facts. In addi- 
tion, the sequence of events, as Tacitus describes them, 
appears motivated and plausible. His description reads 
as if told by an eyewitness. Its most dramatic scene 
would not make any sense, unless the second poisoning 
were performed in the same room which served as the 
dining room. This is the very moment when Agrippina 
—in her fear that the plot might fail—intervenes person- 
ally, at the risk of arousing the suspicion of those present. 
And this she certainly did, for we may safely assume that 
there was no one in the room who did not know that 
Agrippina had a motive to murder her husband: she 
wanted to make her son Nero successor to the throne and 
at the same time save her own life. This situation also 
provides a possible explanation as to why these events— 
as Tacitus says—became so well known later on: it all 
happened in front of eyewitnesses. It seems, then, that 
we must consider the report given by Tacitus as more 
reliable than the one given by Suetonius, which means 
that we have tostart from the fact that the second poison- 
ing was performed in the same room which served as the 
dining room rather than outside of this room—e.g. in 
the bedroom—and that the poison was administered 
orally on this occasion rather than rectally, the clyster 
story being comparatively improbable. 
We may discard as completely improbable the asser- 
tion that Nenophon possibly was in a position to extract 
the active principle from C. colocynthis, the so-called 
colocynthine which, according to F. A. Fliickiger, was 
isolated for the first time by Lebourdais in 1948. This 
substance seems to be a glycoside. With reduced hydro- 
chloric acid, it can be split into sugar and the so-called 
colocyntheine. The lethal dose of colocynthine is, ac- 
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