Sporus "Mistress". Suetonius quotes one Roman who lived around this time who remarked that the world would have been better off if Nero's father Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus had married someone more like the castrated boy. Suetonius places his account of the Nero–Sporus relationship in his scandalous accounts of Nero's sexual aberrations, between his raping a vestal virgin and committing incest with his mother. Some think that Nero used his marriage to Sporus to assuage the feelings of guilt he felt for kicking his pregnant wife Poppaea to death. Dio Cassius, in a more detailed account, writes that Sporus bore an uncanny
Mnester performance of “the same tragedy which the tragedian Neoptolemus had produced at the games during which King Philip of Macedon was killed.” During the reign of Caligula’s successor Claudius, Mnester retained the favor of the imperial court. Mnester was one of the lovers of Poppaea Sabina the Elder (mother of the empress Poppaea), and subsequently became the lover of Empress Messalina who was the wife of Claudius. Messalina had a statue of Mnester cast in bronze. At first he rejected Messalina's advances, but then she persuaded her way in to his heart. Mnester became her lover after Messalina convinced her