Being older, they were allowed to sit up later than was Little Boots. Nero was eleven then, and Drusus ten. I was just the same age as Nero, and I used to wish sometimes that I could play with him and Drusus instead of having to tag around after a baby. That was before I really got acquainted with them. After I did, I would just about as soon have played with Agrippina. They were arrogant, sullen little beasts, hating each other cordially. Drusus was especially bitter because Nero, being older, stood a better chance of some day becoming emperor. From birth, apparently, all the male children in both lines had that idea impressed upon them-to grow up and become an emperor and be poisoned or stabbed in the back. It always seemed to me a ridiculous ambition.

Personally, as long as I had to live in Rome, I preferred to be a slave; for I soon discovered that a well-behaved slave in a wealthy family was about the happiest and safest creature in the Eternal City. As soon as you started up-freedman, freeman, citizen, office holder-then someone below you started sitting up nights brewing poison or sharpening a dagger.

It took me some time to get to sleep that night. In the first place, I was too old to go to bed so early, and, in the second, I had something on my mind. And then a remark of Little Boots just before he fell asleep did not tend to quiet my nerves. He said, "You don't have to worry about having your throat cut, Brit. Mother was just talking nonsense when she said that."

"What do you mean, I don't have to worry about having my throat cut?" I asked.

"It's like this," said Little Boots. "When a slave commits a crime, we do not cut his throat; we crucify him." Then the little brat went to sleep as though his conscience were perfectly snow-white, only I think he never had any conscience. Absolute, 100 per cent selfishness and a conscience cannot abide in the same soul. Perhaps I should say in the same ego, as Caligula had no soul.

I must have fallen asleep eventually, because I was later awakened, a phenomenon which presupposes prior slumber; and how I was awakened! A series of terrifying shrieks and screams were fairly raising the roof from the house of Antonia; then I heard people rushing from doorways all over the place, asking "What?" and "Which?" and "Who?"

I did not have to ask what or which or who. I knew all the answers to these, and now I had the answer to one I had been asking myself just before I fell asleep: When? Knowing all the answers, I was most incurious; so I pulled the covers up over my head and lay very quiet.

Notwithstanding all the racket, Agrippina found Little Boots and me fast asleep when she came barging into our room. She kicked me, and then she shook Little Boots. We were now awake.

"Which one of you imps of Satan put that frog in my bed?" she demanded.

"What frog?" asked Little Boots.

"The frog in my bed," she snapped.

"In your bed?"

"Yes, in my bed. Was it you or this filthy little barbarian? Speak up, before I skin you both alive."

Agrippina was overwrought.