The decision of such judges as Claudius and his Senate is worth very little in the question of a man's innocence or guilt; but the sentence was that Seneca should be banished to the island of Corsica.
CHAPTER VII.
SENECA IN EXILE.
So, in A.D. 41, in the prime of life and the full vigour of his faculties, with a name stained by a charge of which he may have been innocent, but of which he was condemned as guilty, Seneca bade farewell to his noble-minded mother, to his loving aunt, to his brothers, the beloved Gallio and the literary Mela, to his nephew, the ardent and promising young Lucan, and, above all--which cost him the severest pang--to Marcus, his sweet and prattling boy. It was a calamity which might have shaken the fortitude of the very noblest soul, and it had by no means come upon him single handed. Already he had lost his wife, he had suffered from acute and chronic ill-health, he had been bereaved but three weeks previously of another little son. He had been cut short by the jealousy of one emperor from a career of splendid success; he was now banished by the imbecile subservience of another from all that he held most dear.
We are hardly able to conceive the intensity of anguish with which an ancient Roman generally regarded the thought of banishment. In the long melancholy wail of Ovid's "Tristia;" in the bitter and heart-rending complaints of Cicero's "Epistles," we may see something of that intense absorption in the life of Rome which to most of her eminent citizens made a permanent separation from the city and its interests a thought almost as terrible as death itself. Even the stoical and heroic Thrasea openly confessed that he should prefer death to exile. To a heart so affectionate, to a disposition so social, to a mind so active and ambitious as that of Seneca, it must have been doubly bitter to exchange the happiness of his family circle, the splendour of an imperial court, the luxuries of enormous wealth, the refined society of statesmen, and the ennobling intercourse of philosophers for the savage wastes of a rocky island and the society of boorish illiterate islanders, or at the best, of a few other political exiles, all of whom would be as miserable as himself, and some of whom would probably have deserved their fate.
The Mediteranean rocks selected for political exiles--Gyaros, Seriphos, Scyathos, Patmos, Pontia, Pandataria--were generally rocky, barren, fever-stricken places, chosen by design as the most wretched conceivable spots in which human life could be maintained at all. Yet these islands were crowded with exiles, and in them were to be found not a few princesses of Caesarian origin. We must not draw a parallel to their position from that of an Eleanor, the wife of Duke Humphrey, immured in Peel Castle in the Isle of Man, or of a Mary Stuart in the Isle of Loch Levin--for it was something incomparably worse. No care was taken even to provide for their actual wants. Their very lives were not secure. Agrippa Posthumus and Nero, the brothers of the Emperor Caligula, had been so reduced by starvation that both of the wretched youths had been driven to support life by eating the materials with which their beds were stuffed. The Emperor Caius had once asked an exile, whom he had recalled from banishment, in what manner he had been accustomed to employ his time on the island. "I used," said the flatterer, "to pray that Tiberius might die, and that you might succeed." It immediately struck Caius that the exiles whom he had banished might be similarly employed, and accordingly he sent centurions round the islands to put them all to death. Such were the miserable circumstances which might be in store for a political outlaw.[30] If we imagine what must have been the feelings of a d'Espréménil, when a lettee de cachet consigned him to a prison in the Isle d'Hières; or what a man like Burke might have felt, if he had been compelled to retire for life to the Bermudas; we may realize to some extent the heavy trial which now befel the life of Seneca.
[30] Among the Jews the homicides who had fled to a city of refuge were set free on the high priest's death, and, in order to prevent them from praying for his death, the mother and other relatives of the high priest used to supply them with clothes and other necessaries. See the author's article on "Asylum" in Kitto's Encyclopedia (ed. Alexander.)
Corsica was the island chosen for his place of banishment, and a spot more uninviting could hardly have been selected. It was an island "shaggy and savage," intersected from north to south by a chain of wild, inaccessible mountains, clothed to their summits with gloomy and impenetrable forests of pine and fir. Its untamable inhabitants are described by the geographer Strabo as being "wilder than the wild beasts." It produced but little corn, and scarcely any fruit-trees. It abounded, indeed, in swarms of wild bees, but its very honey was bitter and unpalatable, from being infected with the acrid taste of the box-flowers on which they fed. Neither gold nor silver were found there; it produced nothing worth exporting, and barely sufficient for the mere necessaries of its inhabitants; it rejoiced in no great navigable rivers, and even the trees, in which it abounded, were neither beautiful nor fruitful. Seneca describes it in more than one of his epigrams, as a
"Terrible isle, when earliest summer glows
Yet fiercer when his face the dog-star shows;"