30. Agrippina Was Done in by Her Son, Nero
Having secured the throne for her underage son Nero by poisoning her husband, Emperor Claudius, Agrippina the Younger set out to rule by dominating Nero. Salacious contemporary accounts report that she controlled her teenage son with incest. As one Roman-era writer described it: “whenever he rode in a litter with his mother, he had incestuous relations with her, which were betrayed by stains in his clothing“. That kind of upbringing sheds might shed some light on how Nero ended up so unhinged and depraved. When Nero grew older he tried to assert his independence, but his mother refused to give up her power, and kept meddling in government. So he decided to murder her.
Nero resorted to elaborate plans to do in his mother, because he wanted to make her death look accidental. His schemes were straight out of Looney Tunes. He had a roof constructed that was designed to fall down on top of his mother, but she survived the crash. He then gifted Agrippina with a pleasure barge that was specially designed to collapse. The barge did collapse as designed in the middle of a lake while Nero watched from his villa, but to his astonishment, his mother made it out of the wreckage, swam like an otter, and made it to shore. Horrified, and dreading the awkwardness of the inevitable confrontation, Nero finally threw in the towel on subtlety, and abandoning all pretense, he ordered some sailors to go and club his mother to death with oars.
