For that reason only they called the Britons "penitus toto divisos orbe." "Britain (said the pseudo-Hegesippus) lying out of the world, was by the power of the Roman empire reduced into the world," cit. Camden. And the same is implied in another place of Seneca himself—
"Ille Britannos
Ultra noti
Littora ponti, etc.
Dare Romuleis
Colla catenis
But the "Poemata Pithæana," reprinted in Camden, form the most lively commentary on the chorus of the Medea. They are likewise of the Claudian age, they relate to the conquest of Britain, and they are nothing but an expansion of that one idea, the trans-oceanic voyage and ultra-mundane conquest—
"Oceanus.... Qui finis mundo, non erit imperio. Oceanus mêdium venit imperium. At nunc Oceanus geminos interluit orbes, Pars est imperii, terminus ante fuit. Et jam Romano cingimur Oceano. Oceanus jam terga dedit, etc. Conjunctum est, quod adhuc (i.e. nunc) orbis, et orbis erat," &c.
The Chorus of Seneca has no more of prophecy, or sagacious conjecture, or other anticipation of the future, than Gray's "Bard," or the prophecy of Medea in Pindar's "Pythians," both of them fulfilled before the poet's time. Whatever may seem of a larger import, in Seneca's language, than events had fully justified, belongs to the obscure and lofty strain of remote vaticinations, or to the exaggerations of flattery.