Seneca never mentions Agrippina in any of his surviving writings. Indeed his moral treatises deal only infrequently with women in general. De Ira characterizes anger as a “womanly and childish vice,” but its cases in point come from the realm of adult males. Even in Apocolocyntosis, his scathing satire on the abuses of Claudius, Seneca mentions Messalina—the moving force behind numerous executions, and his own exile—only as a victim, not as a perpetrator, of crimes.
