From her mother, the wife of Germanicus, she inherited an imperious and ambitious temperament; she was prepared if necessary to wade through slaughter to the throne.
- Edward Togo Salmon ‘A History of the Roman World 30BC to AD138’
Agrippina was born to power and also its shadow.
-Bill Leadbetter ‘The Ambition of Agrippina the Younger’
Meanwhile a rumour had spread that our army was cut off, and that a furious German host was marching on Gaul. And had not Agrippina prevented the bridge over the Rhine from being destroyed, some in their cowardice would have dared that base act. A woman of heroic spirit, she assumed during those days the duties of a general, and distributed clothes or medicine among the soldiers, as they were destitute or wounded. According to Caius Plinius, the historian of the German wars, she stood at the extremity of the bridge, and bestowed praise and thanks on the returning legions. This made a deep impression on the mind of Tiberius. "Such zeal," he thought, "could not be guileless; it was not against a foreign foe that she was thus courting the soldiers. Generals had nothing left them when a woman went among the companies, attended the standards, ventured on bribery, as though it showed but slight ambition to parade her son in a common soldier's uniform, and wish him to be called Caesar Caligula. Agrippina had now more power with the armies than officers, than generals. A woman had quelled a mutiny which the sovereign's name could not check."
Tacitus' Annals
As soon as the fleet was seen on the horizon, not only the harbour and the adjacent shores, but the city walls too and the roofs and every place which commanded the most distant prospect were filled with crowds of mourners, who incessantly asked one another, whether, when she landed, they were to receive her in silence or with some utterance of emotion. They were not agreed on what befitted the occasion when the fleet slowly approached, its crew, not joyous as is usual, but wearing all a studied expression of grief. When Agrippina descended from the vessel with her two children, clasping the funeral urn, with eyes riveted to the earth, there was one universal groan. You could not distinguish kinsfolk from strangers, or the laments of men from those of women; only the attendants of Agrippina, worn out as they were by long sorrow, were surpassed by the mourners who now met them, fresh in their grief.
Tacitus' Annals
Domitius was the representative of an illustrious family; in the male line descended from noble ancestors, and on the maternal grand-nephew to Augustus, being grandson to Octavia, sister to that Emperor. These splendid considerations rendered the alliance acceptable to Agrippina; but had the character been taken into the account, she ought sooner to have consigned her daughter to the arms of the meanest slave. In an age of unexampled depravity, Domitius was considered as the most depraved.
The intended bride, now in her fifteenth year, was beautiful and accomplished. Endowed with all that quickness of perception and vivacity of fancy, which so often passes for superiority of talent, she made an early progress in every branch of literature, and is said to have composed both in prose and verse with facility and elegance.
That most important part of education, which arises from the circumstances in which the individual is placed, was all against her. Pride of birth, indignation of injustice, resentment of injuries, were all first impressions received by her young mind. Hatred and revenge were never taught by precept but they were excited by example; while pride, which coalesces with every malignant passion, and augments its fury, was enforced as the prerogative of high descent. ....If she might have been so fortunate as to have been united to a man of virtue, she might still have been virtuous; but with such a husband as Domitius, there was little room to hope that Agrippina would escape the contagion of vice.
Elizabeth Hamilton Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina: The Wife of Germanicus, 1804
…..the father of Nero, a man hateful in every walk of life; for when he had gone to the East on the staff of the young Gaius Caesar, he slew one of his own freedmen for refusing to drink as much as he ordered, and when he was in consequence dismissed from the number of Gaius' friends, he lived not a bit less lawlessly. On the contrary, in a village on the Appian Way, suddenly whipping up his team, he purposely ran over and killed a boy; and right in the Roman Forum he gouged out the eye of a Roman knight for being too outspoken in chiding him. He was moreover so dishonest that he not only cheated some bankers of the prices of wares which he had bought. Just before the death of Tiberius he was also charged with treason, as well as with acts of adultery and incest with his sister Lepida, but escaped owing to the change of rulers and died of dropsy at Pyrgi, after acknowledging Nero son of Agrippina, the daughter of Germanicus.
Suetonius The Twelve Caesars
Another manifest indication of Nero's future unhappiness occurred on the day of his purification; for when Gaius Caesar was asked by his sister to give the child whatever name he liked, he looked at his uncle Claudius, who later became emperor and adopted Nero, and said that he gave him his name.
Suetonius The Twelve Caesars
‘Agrippina was a woman who had been educated in the traditions of the Roman aristocracy, and who therefore considered herself merely a means to the political advancement of her relatives and her children’.
Guillermo Ferrero, Women of the Caesars
As such her son was a dynastic weapon, to be honed carefully to ensure her future exercise of power.
Bill Leadbetter, 1997, The Ambition of Agrippina the Younger
She was asserting her partnership in the empire her ancestors had won.
Tacitus Annals
Nothing seemed to satisfy Agrippina, though all the privileges that Livia had enjoyed had been bestowed upon her, and a number of additional honours had been voted. But although she exercised the same power as Claudius she desired to have his title outright…
Suetonius The Twelve Caesars
Agrippina the Younger, unlike her mother and most other women of her dynasty, sought not only political power for her son but a publicly recognized position of authority for herself.
Susan Wood
The sight of an empress sitting in state before the military standards of the Roman army and personally receiving the homage of foreign captives was a novelty and Agrippina’s habit of attended this and the other public functions at Claudius’ side was remarked on by some who saw it as proof of her desire to be an equal partner in the running of the empire.
Annelise Freisenbruch