Tradition asserts that one of these towers was the prison of Seneca the Philosopher. Il Torre di Seneca, as it is called, stands on an escarped pinnacle of rock, terminating one of the loftiest of the detached sugar-loaf hills.
IL TORRE DI SENECA.
Seneca spent seven years in exile, having been banished to Corsica by the emperor Claudius, on suspicion of an illicit intercourse with the profligate Julia. The islands in the Tuscan sea were the Tasmania of the Roman empire, places of transportation for political offenders, and those who fell under the imperial frown—which was the same thing. Some smaller islands off the Italian coast, Procida, Ischia, &c., served the same purpose. Relegatio ad insulam was the legal phrase for this punishment. Augustus banished his grandson Agrippa to the desolate island of Planosa, the Pianosa mentioned just before in connection with Elba. There he was strangled by order of Tiberius.
In some of his Epigrams, and the Books de Consolatione, composed during his exile, Seneca paints the country and the climate in the darkest colours. There is no doubt but these islands, though in sight of the coast of Italy, appeared to the polished Romans as barbarous and full of horrors as our penal settlements at the antipodes were considered long after their first occupation; so that the picture of Corsica, drawn by Seneca, may have been much exaggerated by his distempered and splenetic state of mind. The probability is, that he resided during his exile at one of the Roman colonies on the eastern coast, Aleria or Mariana. What is called the Torre di Seneca is the ruin of a stronghold or watch-tower of the middle ages; and it is not likely that the spot was occupied by the Romans at any period of their dominion in Corsica, their possessions consisting only of the two colonies, and some harbours on the coast.
But those lonely towers standing close to the shore, which we see from time to time as we coast along—massive, round, and grey with lichens as the rocks at their base; what do their ruins tell of times past? Were they a chain of forts for the defence of the coast against Saracen, or other invaders, in the middle ages? They appear too small to hold a garrison, and too insulated for mutual support. More probably they were watch-towers, from which signals were made when the vessels of the corsairs hovered on the coast, that the inhabitants might betake themselves, with their cattle and goods, to the fortified villages and castles on the hills. We are told that, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, there were fifteen of those towers on the north coast of the island, and eighty-five in its whole circuit; but many of them are now fallen to ruin.
At length, Bastia appeared in sight, rising in an amphitheatre to a ridge studded with villas; the houses of the old town being crowded about the port. Sweeping round the mole, we found ourselves in a diminutive harbour, among vessels of small burthen. This basin is surrounded on three sides by tall gloomy buildings, of the roughest construction, piled up, tier above tier, to a great height. A man-of-war's boat shoves off from the shore in good style, and lands the Count's niece with due honours. Other boats come alongside the steamer, and all is confusion.
“Did you see the meeting between the two Corsican brothers—the sallow, fever-worn soldier from Algiers, our poor fellow-traveller, and the hearty mountaineer?”
“No; I was paying my last devoirs to madame.”
“The contrast between the two was striking. I shall never forget the way they were laced in each other's arms, and the glance of keen anxiety with which the mountaineer looked into his sick brother's face, marking the ravages which time and disease had worked on those much-loved features.”