As a matter of fact, Cornelia was perpetually goaded into fresh outbursts of desperation by the tyrannical attitude of her uncle.

Lentulus boasted in her presence that he would accomplish Drusus's undoing.

"I'll imitate Sulla," he would announce, in mean pleasure at giving his niece pain; "I'll see how many heads I can have set up as he did at the Lacus Servilius.

You can go _there_, if you wish to kiss your lover." But Cornelia's life at Rome was rendered unhappy by many other things besides these occasional brutal stabs from her uncle.

Her mother, as has been hinted, was a woman of the world, and had an intense desire to draw her daughter into her own circle of society.