The last dread day is near, and the world's wreck
Shall crush this impious race."
A rude sheep-track led us up the mountain over shattered rocks. Half-way up to the tower, completely hidden among crags and bushes, lies a forsaken Franciscan cloister. The shepherds and the wild fig-tree now dwell in its halls, and the raven croaks the de profundis. But the morning and the evening still come there to hold their silent devotions, and kindle incense of myrtle, mint, and cytisus. What a fragrant breath of herbs is about us! what morning stillness on the mountains and the sea!
We stood on the Tower of Seneca. We had clambered on hands and feet to reach its walls. By holding fast to projecting ledges and hanging perilously over the abyss, you can gain a window. There is no other entrance into the tower; its outer works are destroyed, but the remains show that a castle, either of the seigniors of Cape Corso or of the Genoese, stood here. The tower is built of astonishingly firm material; its battlements, however, are rent and dilapidated. It is unlikely that Seneca lived on this Aornos, this height forsaken by the very birds, and certainly too lofty a flight for moral philosophers—a race that love the levels. Seneca probably lived in one of the Roman colonies, Aleria or Mariana, where the stoic, accustomed to the conveniences of Roman city life, may have established himself comfortably in some house near the sea; so that the favourite mullet and tunny had not far to travel from the strand to his table.
A picture from the fearfully beautiful world of imperial Rome passed before me as I sat on Seneca's tower. Who can say he rightly and altogether comprehends this world? It often seems to me as if it were Hades, and as if the whole human race of the period were holding in its obscure twilight a great diabolic carnival of fools, dancing a gigantic, universal ballet before the Emperor's throne, while the Emperor sits there gloomy as Pluto, only breaking out now and then into insane laughter; for it is the maddest carnival this; old Seneca plays in it too, among the Pulcinellos, and appears in character with his bathing-tub.
Even a Seneca may have something tragi-comic about him, if we think of him, for example, in the pitiably ludicrous shape in which he is represented in the old statue that bears his name. He stands there naked, a cloth about his loins, in the bath in which he means to die, a sight heart-rending to behold, with his meagre form so tremulous about the knees, and his face so unutterably wo-begone. He resembles one of the old pictures of St. Jerome, or some starveling devotee attenuated by penance; he is tragi-comic, provocative of laughter no less than pity, as many of the representations of the old martyrs are, the form of their suffering being usually so whimsical.
Seneca was born, B.C. 3, at Cordova, in Spain, of equestrian family. His mother, Helvia, was a woman of unusual ability; his father, Lucius Annæus, a rhetorician of note, who removed with his family to Rome. In the time of Caligula, Seneca the younger distinguished himself as an orator, and Stoic philosopher of extraordinary learning. A remarkably good memory had been of service to him. He himself relates that after hearing two thousand names once repeated, he could repeat them again in the same order, and that he had no difficulty in doing the same with two hundred verses.
In favour at the court of Claudius, he owed his fall to Messalina. She accused him of an intrigue with the notorious Julia, the daughter of Germanicus, and the most profligate woman in Rome. The imputation is doubly comical, as coming from a Messalina, and because it makes us think of Seneca the moralist as a Don Juan. It is hard to say how much truth there is in the scandalous story, but Rome was a strange place, and nothing can be more bizarre than some of the characters it produced. Julia was got out of the way, and Don Juan Seneca sent into banishment among the barbarians of Corsica. The philosopher now therefore became, without straining the word, a Corsican bandit.
There was in those days no more terrible punishment than that of exile, because expulsion from Rome was banishment from the world. Eight long years Seneca lived on the wild island. I cannot forgive my old friend, therefore, for recording nothing about its nature, about the history and condition of its inhabitants, at that period. A single chapter from the pen of Seneca on these subjects, would now be of great value to us. But to have said nothing about the barbarous country of his exile, was very consistent with his character as Roman. Haughty, limited, void of sympathetic feeling for his kind, was the man of those times. How different is the relation in which we now stand to nature and history!
For the banished Seneca the island was merely a prison that he detested. The little that he says about it in his book De Consolatione ad Matrem Helviam, shows how little he knew of it. For though it was no doubt still more rude and uncultivated than at present, its natural grandeur was the same. He composed the following epigrams on Corsica, which are to be found in his poetical works:—