unfaithfulness of Urgulania, Claudius divorced her, and ordered the child to be stripped naked and exposed to die. His second wife, Aelia Petina, seems to have been an unsuitable person, and her also he divorced. His third and fourth wives lived to earn a colossal infamy–Valeria Messalina for her shameless character, Agrippina the younger for her unscrupulous ambition.
Messalina, when she married, could scarcely have been fifteen years old, yet she at once assumed a dominant position, and secured it by means of the most unblushing wickedness.
But she did not reign so absolutely undisturbed as to be without her own jealousies and apprehensions; and these were mainly kindled by Julia and Agrippina, the two nieces of the Emperor. They were, no less than herself, beautiful, brilliant, and evil-hearted women, quite ready to make their own coteries, and to dispute, as far as they dared, the supremacy of a bold but reckless rival. They too, used their arts, their wealth, their rank, their political influence, their personal fascinations, to secure for themselves a band of adherents, ready, when the proper moment arrived, for any conspiracy. It is unlikely that, even in the first flush of her husband’s strange and unexpected triumph, Messalina should have contemplated with any satisfaction their return from exile. In this respect it is probable that the Emperor succeeded in resisting her expressed wishes; so that the mere appearance of the two daughters of Germanicus in her presence was a standing witness of the limitations to which her influence was subjected.
At this period, as is usual among degraded peoples, the history of the Romans degenerates into mere anecdotes of their rulers. Happily, however, it is not our duty to enter on the _chronique scandaleuse_ of plots and counterplots, as little tolerable to contemplate as the factions of the court of France in the worst periods of its history. We can only ask what possible part a philosopher could play at such a court? We can only say that his position there is not to the credit of his philosophical professions; and that we can contemplate his presence there with as little satisfaction as we look on the figure of the worldly and frivolous bishop in Mr. Frith’s picture of “The Last Sunday of Charles II. at Whitehall.”
And such inconsistencies involve their own retribution, not only in loss of influence and fair fame, but even in direct consequences. It was so with Seneca. Circumstances–possibly a genuine detestation of Messalina’s exceptional infamy–seem to have thrown him among the partisans of her rivals. Messalina was only waiting her opportunity to strike a blow. Julia, possibly as being the younger and the less powerful of the two sisters, was marked out as the first victim, and the opportunity seemed a favourable one for involving Seneca in her ruin. His enormous wealth, his high reputation, his splendid abilities, made him a formidable opponent to the Empress, and a valuable ally to her rivals. It was determined to get rid of both by a single scheme. Julia was accused of an intrigue with Seneca, and was first driven into exile and then put to death. Seneca was banished to the barren and pestilential shores of the island of Corsica.
Seneca, as one of the most enlightened men of his age, should have aimed at a character which would have been above the possibility of suspicion: but we must remember that charges such as those which were brought against him were the easiest of all to make, and the most impossible to refute. When we consider who were Seneca’s accusers, we are not forced to believe his guilt; his character was indeed deplorably weak, and the laxity of the age in such matters was fearfully demoralising; but there are sufficient circumstances in his favour to justify us in returning a verdict of “Not guilty.” Unless we attach an unfair importance to the bitter calumny of his open enemies, we may consider that the general tenor of his life has sufficient weight to exculpate him from an unsupported accusation.
Of Julia, Suetonius expressly says that the crime of which she was accused was uncertain, and that she was condemned unheard. Seneca, on the other hand, was tried in the Senate and found guilty. He tells us that it was not Claudius who flung him down, but rather that, when he was falling headlong, the Emperor supported him with the moderation of his divine hand; “he entreated the Senate on my behalf; he not only _gave_ me life, but even _begged_ it for me. Let it be his to consider,” adds Seneca, with the most dulcet flattery, “in what light he may wish my cause to be regarded; either his justice will find, or his mercy will make, it a good cause. He will alike be worthy of my gratitude, whether his ultimate conviction of my innocence be due to his knowledge or to his will.”
This passage enables us to conjecture how matters stood. The avarice of Messalina was so insatiable that the non-confiscation of Seneca’s immense wealth is a proof that, for some reason, her fear or hatred of him was not implacable. Although it is a remarkable fact that she is barely mentioned, and never once abused, in the writings of Seneca, yet there can be no doubt that the charge was brought by her instigation before the senators; that after a very slight discussion, or none at all, Claudius was, or pretended to be convinced of Seneca’s culpability; that the senators, with their usual abject servility, at once voted him guilty of high treason, and condemned him to death, and the confiscation of his goods; and that Claudius, perhaps from his own respect for literature, perhaps at the intercession of Agrippina, or of some powerful freedman, remitted part of his sentence, just as King James I. remitted all the severest portions of the sentence passed on Francis Bacon.
Neither the belief of Claudius nor the condemnation of the Senate furnish the slightest valid proofs against him. The Senate at this time were so base and so filled with terror, that on one occasion a mere word of accusation from the freedman of an Emperor was sufficient to make them fall upon one of their number and stab him to death upon the spot with their iron pens. As for poor Claudius, his administration of justice, patient and laborious as it was, had already grown into a public joke. On one occasion he wrote down and delivered the wise decision, “that he agreed with the side which had set forth the truth.” On another occasion, a common Greek whose suit came before him grew so impatient at his stupidity as to exclaim aloud, “You are an old fool.” We are not informed that the Greek was punished. Roman usage allowed a good deal of banter and coarse personality. We are told that on one occasion even the furious and bloody Caligula, seeing a provincial smile, called him up, and asked him what he was laughing at. “At you,” said the man, “you look such a humbug.” The grim tyrant was so struck with the humour of the thing that he took no further notice of it. A Roman knight against whom some foul charge had been trumped up, seeing Claudius listening to the most contemptible and worthless evidence against him, indignantly abused him for his cruel stupidity, and flung his pen and tablets in his face so violently as to cut his cheek. In fact, the Emperor’s singular absence of mind gave rise to endless anecdotes. Among other things, when some condemned criminals were to fight as gladiators, and addressed him before the games in the sublime formula–“Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutamus!” (“Hail, Caesar! doomed to die, we salute thee!”) he gave the singularly inappropriate answer, “Avete vos!” (“Hail ye also!”) which they took as a sign of pardon, and were unwilling to fight until they were actually forced to do so by the gestures of the Emperor.
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’Espremenil, when a _lettee de cachet_ consigned him to a prison in the Isle d’Hieres; 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.
[Footnote 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;”
and again as a
“Barbarous land, which rugged rocks surround, Whose horrent cliffs with idle wastes are crowned, No autumn fruit, no tilth the summer yields, Nor olives cheer the winter-silvered fields: Nor joyous spring her tender foliage lends, Nor genial herb the luckless soil befriends; Nor bread, nor sacred fire, nor freshening wave;– Nought here–save exile, and the exile’s grave!”
In such a place, and under such conditions, Seneca had ample need for all his philosophy. And at first it did not fail him. Towards the close of his first year of exile he wrote the “Consolation to his mother Helvia,” which is one of the noblest and most charming of all his works.
He had often thought, he said, of writing to console her under this deep and wholly unlooked-for trial, but hitherto he had abstained from doing so, lest, while his own anguish and hers were fresh, he should only renew the pain of the wound by his unskilful treatment. He waited, therefore till time had laid its healing hand upon her sorrows, especially because he found no precedent for one in his position condoling with others when he himself seemed more in need of consolation, and because something new and admirable would be required of a man who, as it were, raised his head from the funeral pyre to console his friends. Still he now feels impelled to write to her, because to alleviate her regrets will be to lay aside his own. He does not attempt to conceal from her the magnitude of the misfortune, because so far from being a mere novice in sorrow, she has tasted it from her earliest years in all its varieties; and because his purpose was to conquer her grief, not to extenuate its causes. Those many miseries would indeed have been in vain, if they had not taught her how to bear wretchedness. He will prove to her therefore that she has no cause to grieve either on his account, or on her own. Not on his–because he is happy among circumstances which others would think miserable and because he assures her with his own lips that not only is he _not_ miserable, but that he can never be made so. Every one can secure his own happiness, if he learns to seek it, not in external circumstances, but in himself. He cannot indeed claim for himself the title of wise, for, if so, he would be the most fortunate of men, and near to God Himself; but, which is the next best thing, he has devoted himself to the study of wise men, and from them he has learnt to expect nothing and to be prepared for all things. The blessings which Fortune had hitherto bestowed on him,–wealth, honours, glory,–he had placed in such a position that she might rob him of them all without disturbing him. There was a great _space_ between them and himself, so that they could be _taken_ but not _torn_ away. Undazzled by the glamour of prosperity, he was unshaken by the blow of adversity. In circumstances which were the envy of all men he had never seen any real or solid blessing, but rather a painted emptiness, a gilded deception; and similarly he found nothing really hard or terrible in ills which the common voice has so described.
What, for instance, was exile? it was but a change of place, an absence from one’s native land; and, if you looked at the swarming multitudes in Rome itself, you would find that the majority of them were practically in contented and willing exile, drawn thither by necessity, by ambition, or by the search for the best opportunities of vice. No isle so wretched and so bleak which did not attract some voluntary sojourners; even this precipitous and naked rock of Corsica, the hungriest, roughest, most savage, most unhealthy spot conceivable, had more foreigners in it than native inhabitants. The natural restlessness and mobility of the human mind, which arose from its aetherial origin, drove men to change from place to place. The colonies of different nations, scattered all over the civilized and uncivilized world even in spots the most chilly and uninviting, show that the condition of place is no necessary ingredient in human happiness. Even Corsica had often changed its owners; Greeks from Marseilles had first lived there, then Ligurians and Spaniards, then some Roman colonists, whom the aridity and thorniness of the rock had not kept away.
“Varro thought that nature, Brutus that the consciousness of virtue, were sufficient consolations for any exile. How little have I lost in comparison with those two fairest possessions which I shall everywhere enjoy–nature and my own integrity! Whoever or whatever made the world–whether it were a deity, or disembodied reason, or a divine interfusing spirit, or destiny, or an immutable series of connected causes–the result was that nothing, except our very meanest possessions, should depend on the will of another. Man’s best gifts lie beyond the power of man either to give or to take away. This Universe, the grandest and loveliest work of nature, and the Intellect which was created to observe and to admire it, are our special and eternal possessions, which shall last as long as we last ourselves. Cheerful, therefore, and erect, let us hasten with undaunted footsteps whithersoever our fortunes lead us.
“There is no land where man cannot dwell,–no land where he cannot uplift his eyes to heaven; wherever we are, the distance of the divine from the human remains the same. So then, as long as my eyes are not robbed of that spectacle with which they cannot be satiated, so long as I may look upon the sun and moon, and fix my lingering gaze on the other constellations, and consider their rising and setting and the spaces between them and the causes of their less and greater speed,–while I may contemplate the multitude of stars glittering throughout the heaven, some stationary, some revolving, some suddenly blazing forth, others dazzling the gaze with a flood of fire as though they fell, and others leaving over a long space their trails of light; while I am in the midst of such phenomena, and mingle myself, as far as a man may, with things celestial,–while my soul is ever occupied in contemplations so sublime as these, what matters it what ground I tread?
“What though fortune has thrown me where the most magnificent abode is but a cottage? the humblest cottage, if it be but the home of virtue, may be more beautiful than all temples; no place is narrow which can contain the crowd of glorious virtues; no exile severe into which you may go with such a reliance. When Brutus left Marcellus at Mitylene, he seemed to be himself going into exile because he left that illustrious exile behind him. Caesar would not land at Mitylene, because he blushed to see him. Marcellus therefore, though he was living in exile and poverty, was living a most happy and a most noble life.
“‘One self-approving hour whole worlds outweighs Of stupid starers and of loud huzzas; And more true joy Marcellus exiled feels, Than Caesar with a senate at his heels.’
“And as for poverty every one who is not corrupted by the madness of avarice and luxury know that it is no evil. How little does man need, and how easily can he secure that! As for me, I consider myself as having lost not wealth, but the trouble of looking after it. Bodily wants are few–warmth and food, nothing more. May the gods and goddesses confound that gluttony which sweeps the sky, and sea and land for birds, and animals, and fish; which eats to vomit and vomits to eat, and hunts over the whole world for that which after all it cannot even digest! They might satisfy their hunger with little, and they excite it with much. What harm can poverty inflict on a man who despises such excesses? Look at the god-like and heroic poverty of our ancestors, and compare the simple glory of a Camillus with the lasting infamy of a luxurious Apicius! Even exile will yield a sufficiency of necessaries, but not even kingdoms are enough for superfluities. It is the soul that makes us rich or poor: and the soul follows us into exile, and finds and enjoys its own blessings even in the most barren solitudes.
“But it does not even need philosophy to enable us to despise poverty. Look at the poor: are they not often obviously happier than the rich? And the times are so changed that what we would now consider the poverty of an exile would then have been regarded as the patrimony of a prince. Protected by such precedents as those of Homer, and Zeno, and Menenius Agrippa, and Regulus, and Scipio, poverty becomes not only safe but even estimable.
“And if you make the objection that the ills which assail me are not exile only, or poverty only, but disgrace as well, I reply that the soul which is hard enough to resist one wound is invulnerable to all. If we have utterly conquered the fear of death, nothing else can daunt us. What is disgrace to one who stands above the opinion of the multitude? what was even a death of disgrace to Socrates, who by entering a prison made it cease to be disgraceful? Cato was twice defeated in his candidature for the praetorship and consulship: well, this was the disgrace of those honours, and not of Cato. No one can be despised by another until he has learned to despise himself. The man who has learned to triumph over sorrow wears his miseries as though they were sacred fillets upon his brow, and nothing is so entirely admirable as a man bravely wretched. Such men inflict disgrace upon disgrace itself. Some indeed say that death is preferable to contempt; to whom I reply that he who is great when he falls is great in his prostration, and is no more an object of contempt than when men tread on the ruins of sacred buildings, which men of piety venerate no less than if they stood.
“On my behalf therefore, dearest mother; you have no cause for endless weeping: nor have you on your own. You cannot grieve for me on selfish grounds, in consequence of any personal loss to yourself; for you were ever eminently unselfish, and unlike other women in all your dealings with your sons, and you were always a help and a benefactor to them rather than they to you. Nor should you give way out of a regret and longing for me in my absence. We have often previously been separated, and, although it is natural that you should miss that delightful conversation, that unrestricted confidence, that electrical sympathy of heart and intellect that always existed between us, and that boyish glee wherewith your visits always affected me, yet, as you rise above the common herd of women in virtue, the simplicity, the purity of your life, you must abstain from feminine tears as you have done from all feminine follies. Consider how Cornelia, who had lost ten children by death, instead of wailing for her dead sons, thanked fortune that had made her sons _Gracchi_. Rutilia followed her son Cotta into exile so dearly did she love him, yet no one saw her shed a tear after his burial. She had shown her affection when it was needful, she restrained her sorrow when it was superflous. Imitate the example of these great women as you have imitated their virtues. I want you not to _beguile_ your sorrow by amusements or occupations, but to _conquer_ it. For you may now return to those philosophical studies in which you once showed yourself so apt a proficient, and which formerly my father checked. They will gradually sustain and comfort you in your hour of grief.
“And meanwhile consider how many sources of consolation already exist for you. My brothers are still with you; the dignity of Gallio, the leisure of Mela, will protect you; the ever-sparkling mirth of my darling little Marcus will cheer you up; the training of my little favourite Novatilla will be a duty which will assuage your sorrow. For your father’s sake, too, though he is absent from you, you must moderate your lamentations. Above all, your sister–that truly faithful, loving, and high-souled lady, to whom I owe so deep a debt of affection for her kindness to me from my cradle until now,–she will yield you the fondest sympathy and the truest consolation.
“But since I know that after all your thoughts will constantly revert to me, and that none of your children will be more frequently before your mind than I,–not because they are less dear to you than I, but because it is natural to lay the hand most often upon the spot which pains,–I will tell you how you are to think of me. Think of me as happy and cheerful, as though I were in the midst of blessings; as indeed I am, while my mind, free from every care, has leisure for its own pursuits, and sometimes amuses itself with lighter studies, sometimes, eager for truth, soars upwards to the contemplation of its own nature, and the nature of the universe. It inquires first of all about the lands and their situation; then into the condition of the surrounding sea, its ebbings and flowings; then it carefully studies all this terror-fraught interspace between heaven and earth, tumultuous with thunders and lightnings, and the blasts of winds, and the showers of rain, and snow and hail; then, having wandered through all the lower regions, it bursts upwards to the highest things, and revels in the most lovely–spectacle of that which is divine, and, mindful of its own eternity, passes into all that hath been and all that shall be throughout all ages.”
Such in briefest outline, and without any of that grace of language with which Seneca has invested it, is a sketch of the little treatise which many have regarded as among the most delightful of Seneca’s works. It presents the picture of that grandest of all spectacles–
“A good man struggling with the storms of fate.”
So far there was something truly Stoical in the aspect of Seneca’s exile. But was this grand attitude consistently maintained? Did his little raft of philosophy sink under him, or did it bear him safely over the stormy waves of this great sea of adversity.
CHAPTER VIII.
SENECA’S PHILOSOPHY GIVES WAY.
There are some misfortunes of which the very essence consists in their continuance. They are tolerable so long as they are illuminated by a ray of hope. Seclusion and hardship might even come at first with some charm of novelty to a philosopher who, as was not unfrequent among the amateur thinkers of his time, occasionally practised them in the very midst of wealth and friends. But as the hopeless years rolled on, as the efforts of friends proved unavailing, as the loving son, and husband, and father felt himself cut off from the society of those whom he cherished in such tender affection, as the dreary island seemed to him ever more barbarous and more barren, while season after season added to its horrors without revealing a single compensation, Seneca grew more and more disconsolate and depressed. It seemed to be his miserable destiny to rust away, useless, unbefriended, and forgotten. Formed to fascinate society, here there were none for him to fascinate; gifted with an eloquence which could keep listening senates hushed, here he found neither subject nor audience; and his life began to resemble a river which, long before it has reached the sea, is lost in dreary marshes and choking sands.
Like the brilliant Ovid, when he was banished to the frozen wilds of Tomi, Seneca vented his anguish in plaintive wailing and bitter verse. In his handful of epigrams he finds nothing too severe for the place of his exile. He cries–
“Spare thou thine exiles, lightly o’er thy dead, Alive, yet buried, be thy dust bespread.”
And addressing some malignant enemy–
“Whoe’er thou art,–thy name shall I repeat?– Who o’er mine ashes dar’st to press thy feet, And, uncontented with a fall so dread, Draw’st bloodstained weapons on my darkened head, Beware! for nature, pitying, guards the tomb, And ghosts avenge th’ invaders of their gloom, Hear, Envy, hear the gods proclaim a truth, Which my shrill ghost repeats to move thy ruth, WRETCHES ARE SACRED THINGS,–thy hands refrain: E’en sacrilegious hands from TOMBS abstain.”
The one fact that seems to have haunted him most was that his abode in Corsica was a living death.
But the most complete picture of his state of mind, and the most melancholy memorial of his inconsistency as a philosopher, is to be found in his “Consolation to Polybius.” Polybius was one of those freedmen of the Emperor whose bloated wealth and servile insolence were one of the darkest and strangest phenomena of the time. Claudius, more than any of his class, from the peculiar imbecility of his character, was under the powerful influence of this class of men; and so dangerous was their power that Messalina herself was forced to win her ascendency over her husband’s mind by making these men her supporters, and cultivating their favour. Such were “the most excellent Felix,” the judge of St. Paul, and the slave who became a husband to three queens,–Narcissus, in whose household (which moved the envy of the Emperor) were some of those Christians to whom St. Paul sends greetings from the Christians of Corinth,[31]–Pallas, who never deigned to speak to his own slaves, but gave all his commands by signs, and who actually condescended to receive the thanks of the Senate, because he, the descendant of Etruscan kings, yet condescended to serve the Emperor and the Commonwealth; a preposterous and outrageous compliment, which appears to have been solely due to the fact of his name being identical with that of Virgil’s young hero, the son of the mythic Evander!
[Footnote 31: Rom. xvi. 11.]
Among this unworthy crew a certain Polybius was not the least conspicuous. He was the director of the Emperor’s studies,–a worthy Alcuin to such a Charlemagne. All that we know about him is that he was once the favourite of Messalina, and afterwards her victim, and that in the day of his eminence the favour of the Emperor placed him so high that he was often seen walking between the two consuls. Such was the man to whom, on the occasion of his brother’s death, Seneca addressed this treatise of consolation. It has come down to us as a fragment, and it would have been well for Seneca’s fame if it had not come down to us at all. Those who are enthusiastic for his reputation would gladly prove it spurious, but we believe that no candid reader can study it without perceiving its genuineness. It is very improbable that he ever intended it to be published, and whoever suffered it to see the light was the successful enemy of its illustrious author.
Its sad and abject tone confirms the inference, drawn from an allusion which it contains, that it was written towards the close of the third year of Seneca’s exile. He apologises for its style by saying that if it betrayed any weakness of thought or inelegance of expression this was only what might be expected from a man who had so long been surrounded by the coarse and offensive _patois_ of barbarians. We need hardly follow him into the ordinary topics of moral philosophy with which it abounds, or expose the inconsistency of its tone with that of Seneca’s other writings. He consoles the freedman with the “common commonplaces” that death is inevitable; that grief is useless; that we are all born to sorrow; that the dead would not wish us to be miserable for their sakes. He reminds him that, owing to his illustrious position, all eyes are upon him. He bids him find consolation in the studies in which he has always shown himself so pre-eminent, and lastly he refers him to those shining examples of magnanimous fortitude, for the climax of which, no doubt, the whole piece of interested flattery was composed. For this passage, written in a _crescendo_ style, culminates, as might have been expected, in the sublime spectacle of Claudius Caesar. So far from resenting his exile, he crawls in the dust to kiss Caesar’s beneficent feet for saving him from death; so far from asserting his innocence–which, perhaps, was impossible, since to do so might have involved him in a fresh charge of treason–he talks with all the abjectness of guilt. He belauds the clemency of a man, who, he tells us elsewhere, used to kill men with as much _sang froid_ as a dog eats offal; the prodigious powers of memory of a divine creature who used to ask people to dice and to dinner whom he had executed the day before, and who even inquired as to the cause of his wife’s absence a few days after having given the order for her execution; the extraordinary eloquence of an indistinct stutterer, whose head shook and whose broad lips seemed to be in contortions whenever he spoke.[32] If Polybius feels sorrowful, let him turn his eyes to Caesar; the splendour of that most great and radiant deity will so dazzle his eyes that all their tears will be dried up in the admiring gaze. Oh that the bright occidental star which has beamed on a world which, before its rising, was plunged in darkness and deluge, would only shed one little beam upon him!
[Footnote 32: These slight discrepancies of description are taken from counter passages of _Consol, ad Polyb._. and the _Ludus de Morte Caesaris._]
No doubt these grotesque and gorgeous flatteries, contrasting strangely with the bitter language of intense hatred and scathing contempt which Seneca poured out on the memory of Claudius after his death, were penned with the sole purpose of being repeated in those divine and benignant ears. No doubt the superb freedman, who had been allowed so rich a share of the flatteries lavished on his master, would take the opportunity–if not out of good nature, at least out of vanity,–to retail them in the imperial ear. If the moment were but favourable, who knows but what at some oblivious and crapulous moment the Emperor might be induced to sign an order for our philosopher’s recall?
Let us not be hard on him. Exile and wretchedness are stern trials, and it is difficult for him to brave a martyr’s misery who has no conception of a martyr’s crown. To a man who, like Seneca, aimed at being not only a philosopher, but also a man of the world–who in this very treatise criticises the Stoics for their ignorance of life–there would not have seemed to be even the shadow of disgrace in a private effusion of insincere flattery intended to win the remission of a deplorable banishment. Or, if we condemn Seneca, let us remember that Christians, no less than philosophers, have attained a higher eminence only to exemplify a more disastrous fall. The flatteries of Seneca to Claudius are not more fulsome, and are infinitely less disgraceful, than those which fawning bishops exuded on his counterpart, King James. And if the Roman Stoic can gain nothing from a comparison with the yet more egregious moral failure of the greatest of Christian thinkers—Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Alban’s–let us not forget that a Savonarola and a Cranmer recanted under torment, and that the anguish of exile drew even from the starry and imperial spirit of Dante Alighieri words and sentiments for which in his noblest moments he might have blushed.
CHAPTER IX.
SENECA’S RECALL FROM EXILE.
Of the last five years of Seneca’s weary exile no trace has been preserved to us. What were his alternations of hope and fear, of devotion to philosophy and of hankering after the world which he had lost, we cannot tell. Any hopes which he may have entertained respecting the intervention of Polybius in his favour must have been utterly quenched when he heard that the freedman, though formerly powerful with Messalina, had forfeited his own life in consequence of her machinations. But the closing period of his days in Corsica must have brought him thrilling news, which would save him from falling into absolute despair.
For the career of Messalina was drawing rapidly to a close. The life of this beautiful princess, short as it was, for she died at a very early age, was enough to make her name a proverb of everlasting infamy. For a time she appeared irresistible. Her personal fascination had won for her an unlimited sway over the facile mind of Claudius, and she had either won over by her intrigues, or terrified by her pitiless severity, the noblest of the Romans and the most powerful of the freedmen. But we see in her fate, as we see on every page of history, that vice ever carries with it the germ of its own ruin, and that a retribution, which is all the more inevitable from being often slow, awaits every violation of the moral law.
There is something almost incredible in the penal infatuation which brought about her fall. During the absence of her husband at Ostia, she wedded in open day with C. Silius, the most beautiful and the most promising of the young Roman nobles. She had apparently persuaded Claudius that this was merely a mock-marriage, intended to avert some ominous auguries which threatened to destroy “the husband of Messalina;” but, whatever Claudius may have imagined, all the rest of the world knew the marriage to be real, and regarded it not only as a vile enormity, but also as a direct attempt to bring about a usurpation of the imperial power.
It was by this view of the case that the freedman Narcissus roused the inert spirit and timid indignation of the injured Emperor. While the wild revelry of the wedding ceremony was at its height, Vettius Valens, a well-known physician of the day, had in the license of the festival struggled up to the top of a lofty tree, and when they asked him what he saw, he replied in words which, though meant for jest, were full of dreadful significance, “I see a fierce storm approaching from Ostia.” He had scarcely uttered the words when first an uncertain rumour, and then numerous messengers brought the news that Claudius knew all, and was coming to take vengeance. The news fell like a thunderbolt on the assembled guests. Silius, as though nothing had happened, went to transact his public duties in the Forum; Messalina instantly sending for her children, Octavia and Britannicus, that she might meet her husband with them by her side, implored the protection of Vibidia, the eldest of the chaste virgins of Vesta, and, deserted by all but three companions, fled on foot and unpitied, through the whole breadth of the city, until she reached the Ostian gate, and mounted the rubbish-cart of a market gardener which happened to be passing. But Narcissus absorbed both the looks and the attention of the Emperor by the proofs and the narrative of her crimes, and, getting rid of the Vestal by promising her that the cause of Messalina should be tried, he hurried Claudius forward, first to the house of Silius, which abounded with the proofs of his guilt, and then to the camp of the Praetorians, where swift vengeance was taken on the whole band of those who had been involved in Messalina’s crimes. She meanwhile, in alternative paroxysms of fury and abject terror, had taken refuge in the garden of Lucullus, which she had coveted and made her own by injustice. Claudius, who had returned home, and had recovered some of his facile equanimity in the pleasures of the table, showed signs of relenting; but Narcissus knew that delay was death, and on his own authority sent a tribune and centurions to despatch the Empress. They found her prostrate on the ground at the feet of her mother Lepida, with whom in her prosperity she had quarrelled, but who now came to pity and console her misery, and to urge her to that voluntary death which alone could save her from imminent and more cruel infamy. But the mind of Messalina, like that of Nero afterwards, was so corrupted by wickedness that not even such poor nobility was left in her as is implied in the courage of despair. While she wasted the time in tears and lamentations, a noise was heard of battering at the doors, and the tribune stood by her in stern silence, the freedman with slavish vituperation. First she took the dagger in her irresolute hand, and after she had twice stabbed herself in vain, the tribune drove home the fatal blow, and the corpse of Messalina, like that of Jezebel, lay weltering in its blood in the plot of ground of which her crimes had robbed its lawful owner. Claudius, still lingering at his dinner, was informed that she had perished, and neither asked a single question at the time, nor subsequently displayed the slightest sign of anger, of hatred, of pity, or of any human emotion.
The absolute silence of Seneca respecting the woman who had caused him the bitterest anguish and humiliation of his life is, as we have remarked already, a strange and significant phenomenon. It is clearly not due to accident, for the vices which he is incessantly describing and denouncing would have found in this miserable woman their most flagrant illustration, nor could contemporary history have furnished a more apposite example of the vindication by her fate of the stern majesty of the moral law. But yet, though Seneca had every reason to loathe her character and to detest her memory, though he could not have rendered to his patrons a more welcome service than by blackening her reputation, he never so much as mentions her name. And this honourable silence gives us a favourable insight into his character. For it can only be due to his pitying sense of the fact that even Messalina, bad as she undoubtedly was, had been judged already by a higher Power, and had met her dread punishment at the hand of God. It has been conjectured, with every appearance of probability, that the blackest of the scandals which were believed and circulated respecting her had their origin in the published autobiography of her deadly enemy and victorious successor. The many who had had a share in Messalina’s fall would be only too glad to poison every reminiscence of her life; and the deadly implacable hatred of the worst woman who ever lived would find peculiar gratification in scattering every conceivable hue of disgrace over the acts of a rival whose young children it was her dearest object to supplant. That Seneca did not deign to chronicle even of an enemy what Agrippina was not ashamed to write,–that he spared one whom it was every one’s interest and pleasure to malign,–that he regarded her terrible fall as a sufficient claim to pity, as it was a sufficient Nemesis upon her crimes,–is a trait in the character of the philosopher which has hardly yet received the credit which it deserves.
CHAPTER X.
AGRIPPINA, THE MOTHER OF NERO.
Scarcely had the grave closed over Messalina when the court was plunged into the most violent factions about the appointment of her successor. There were three principal candidates for the honour of the aged Emperor’s hand. They were his former wife, Aelia Petina, who had only been divorced in consequence of trivial disagreements, and who was supported by Narcissus; Lollia Paulina, so celebrated in antiquity for her beauty and splendour, and who for a short time had been the wife of Caius; and Agrippina the younger, the daughter of the great Germanicus, and the niece of Claudius himself. Claudius, indeed, who had been as unlucky as Henry VIII. himself in the unhappiness which had attended his five experiments of matrimony, had made the strongest possible asseverations that he would never again submit himself to such a yoke. But he was so completely a tool in the hands of his own courtiers that no one attached the slightest importance to anything which he had said.
The marriage of an uncle with his own niece was considered a violation of natural laws, and was regarded with no less horror among the Romans than it would be among ourselves. But Agrippina, by the use of means the most unscrupulous, prevailed over all her rivals, and managed her interests with such consummate skill that, before many months had elapsed, she had become the spouse of Claudius and the Empress of Rome.
With this princess the destinies of Seneca were most closely intertwined, and it will enable us the better to understand his position, and his writings, if we remember that all history discloses to us no phenomenon more portentous and terrible than that presented to us in the character of Agrippina, the mother of Nero.
Of the virtues of her great parents she, like their other children, had inherited not one; and she had exaggerated their family tendencies into passions which urged her into every form of crime. Her career from the very cradle had been a career of wickedness, nor had any one of the many fierce vicissitudes of her life called forth in her a single noble or amiable trait. Born at Oppidum Ubiorum (afterwards called in her honour Colonia Agrippina, and still retaining its name in the form Cologne), she lost her father at the age of three, and her mother (by banishment) at the age of twelve. She was educated with bad sisters, with a wild and wicked brother, and under a grandmother whom she detested. At the age of fourteen she was married to Cnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, one of the most worthless and ill-reputed of the young Roman nobles of his day. The gossiping biographies of the time still retain some anecdotes of his cruelty and selfishness. They tell us how he once, without the slightest remorse, ran over a poor boy who was playing on the Appian Road; how on another occasion he knocked out the eye of a Roman knight who had given him a hasty answer; and how, when his friend congratulated him on the birth of his son (the young Claudius Domitius, afterwards the Emperor Nero), he brutally remarked that from people like himself and Agrippina could only be born some monster destined for the public ruin.
Domitius was forty years old when he married Agrippina, and the young Nero was not born till nine years afterwards. Whatever there was of possible affection in the tigress-nature of Agrippina was now absorbed in the person of her child. For that child, from its cradle to her own death by his means, she toiled and sinned. The fury of her own ambition, inextricably linked with the uncontrollable fierceness of her love for this only son, henceforth directed every action of her life. Destiny had made her the sister of one Emperor; intrigue elevated her into the wife of another; her own crimes made her the mother of a third. And at first sight her career might have seemed unusually successful, for while still in the prime of life she was wielding, first in the name of her husband, and then in that of her son, no mean share in the absolute government of the Roman world. But meanwhile that same unerring retribution, whose stealthy footsteps in the rear of the triumphant criminal we can track through page after page of history, was stealing nearer and nearer to her with uplifted hand. When she had reached the dizzy pinnacle of gratified love and pride to which she had waded through so many a deed of sin and blood, she was struck down into terrible ruin and violent shameful death, by the hand of that very son for whose sake she had so often violated the laws of virtue and integrity, and spurned so often the pure and tender obligations which even the heathen had been taught by the voice of God within their conscience to recognize and to adore.
Intending that her son should marry Octavia, the daughter of Claudius, her first step was to drive to death Silanus, a young nobleman to whom Octavia had already been betrothed. Her next care was to get rid of all rivals possible or actual. Among the former were the beautiful Calpurnia and her own sister-in-law, Domitia Lepida. Among the latter was the wealthy Lollia Paulina, against whom she trumped up an accusation of sorcery and treason, upon which her wealth was confiscated, but her life spared by the Emperor, who banished her from Italy. This half-vengeance was not enough for the mother of Nero. Like the daughter of Herodias in sacred history, she despatched a tribune with orders to bring her the head of her enemy; and when it was brought to her, and she found a difficulty in recognizing those withered and ghastly features of a once-celebrated beauty, she is said with her own hand to have lifted one of the lips, and to have satisfied herself that this was indeed the head of Lollia. To such horrors may a woman sink, when she has abandoned the love of God; and a fair face may hide a soul “leprous as sin itself.” Well may Adolf Stahr observe that Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth and husband-murdering Gertrude are mere children by the side of this awful giant-shape of steely feminine cruelty.
Such was the princess who, in the year A.D. 49, recalled Seneca from exile.[33] She saw that her cruelties were inspiring horror even into a city that had long been accustomed to blood, and Tacitus expressly tells us that she hoped to counterbalance this feeling by a stroke of popularity in recalling from the waste solitudes of Corsica the favourite philosopher and most popular author of the Roman world. Nor was she content with this public proof of her belief in his innocence of the crime which had been laid to his charge, for she further procured for him the Praetorship, and appointed him tutor and governor to her youthful son. Even in taking this step she did not forget her ambitious views; for she knew that Seneca cherished a secret indignation against Claudius, and that Nero could have no more wise adviser in taking steps to secure the fruition of his imperial hopes. It might perhaps have been better for Seneca’s happiness if he had never left Corsica, or set his foot again in that Circean and bloodstained court. Let it, however, be added in his exculpation, that another man of undoubted and scrupulous honesty,–Afranius Burrus–a man of the old, blunt, faithful type of Roman manliness, whom Agrippina had raised to the Prefectship of the Praetorian cohorts, was willing to share his danger and his responsibilities. Yet he must have lived from the first in the very atmosphere of base and criminal intrigues. He must have formed an important member of Agrippina’s party, which was in daily and deadly enmity against the party of Narcissus. He must have watched the incessant artifices by which Agrippina secured the adoption of her son Nero by an Emperor whose own son Britannicus was but three years his junior. He must have seen Nero always honoured, promoted, paraded before the eyes of the populace as the future hope of Rome, whilst Britannicus, like the young Edward V. under the regency of his uncle, was neglected, surrounded with spies, kept as much as possible out of his father’s sight, and so completely thrust into the background from all observation that the populace began seriously to doubt whether he were alive or dead. He must have seen Agrippina, who had now received the unprecedented honour of the title “Augusta” in her lifetime, acting with such haughty insolence that there could be little doubt as to her ulterior designs upon the throne. He must have known that his splendid intellect was practically at the service of a woman in whom avarice, haughtiness, violence, treachery, and every form of unscrupulous criminality had reached a point hitherto unmatched even in a corrupt and pagan world. From this time forth the biography of Seneca must assume the form of an apology rather than of a panegyric.
[Footnote 33: Gallio was Proconsul of Achaia about A.D. 53, when St. Paul was brought before his tribunal. Very possibly his elevation may have been due to the restoration of Seneca’s influence.]
The Emperor could not but feel that in Agrippina he had chosen a wife even more intolerable than Messalina herself. Messalina had not interfered with the friends he loved, had not robbed him of the insignia of empire, had not filled his palace with a hard and unfeminine tyranny, and had of course watched with a mother’s interest over the lives and fortunes of his children. Narcissus would not be likely to leave him long in ignorance that, in addition to her other plots and crimes, Agrippina had been as little true to him as his former unhappy wife. The information sank deep into his heart, and he was heard to mutter that it had been his destiny all along first to bear, and then to avenge, the enormities of his wives. Agrippina, whose spies filled the palace, could not long remain uninformed of so significant a speech; and she probably saw with an instinct quickened by the awful terrors of her own guilty conscience that the Emperor showed distinct signs of his regret for having married his niece, and adopted her child to the prejudice, if not to the ruin, of his own young son. If she wanted to reach the goal which she had held so long in view no time was to be lost. Let us hope that Seneca and Burrus were at least ignorant of the means which she took to effect her purpose.
Fortune favoured her. The dreaded Narcissus, the most formidable obstacle to her murderous plans, was seized with an attack of the gout. Agrippina managed that his physician should recommend him the waters of Sinuessa in Campania by way of cure. He was thus got out of the way, and she proceeded at once to her work of blood. Entrusting the secret to Halotus, the Emperor’s _praegustator_–the slave whose office it was to protect him from poison by tasting every dish before him–and to his physician, Xenophon of Cos, she consulted Locusta, the Mrs. Turner of the period of this classical King James, as to the poison best suited to her purpose. Locusta was mistress of her art, in which long practice had given her a consummate skill. The poison must not be too rapid, lest it should cause suspicion; nor too slow, lest it should give the Emperor time to consult for the interests of his son Britannicus; but it was to be one which should disturb his intellect without causing immediate death. Claudius was a glutton, and the poison was given him with all the more ease because it was mixed with a dish of mushrooms, of which he was extravagantly fond. Agrippina herself handed him the choicest mushroom in the dish, and the poison at once reduced him to silence. As was too frequently the case, Claudius was intoxicated at the time, and was carried off to his bed as if nothing had happened. A violent colic ensued, and it was feared that this, with a quantity of wine which he had drunk, would render the poison innocuous. But Agrippina had gone too far for retreat, and Xenophon, who knew that great crimes if frustrated are perilous, if successful are rewarded, came to her assistance. Under pretence of causing him to vomit, he tickled the throat of the Emperor with a feather smeared with a swift and deadly poison. It did its work, and before morning the Caesar was a corpse.[34]
[Footnote 34: There is usually found among the writings of Seneca a most remarkable burlesque called _Ludus de Morte Caesaris_. As to its authorship opinions will always vary, but it is a work of such undoubted genius, so interesting, and so unique in its character, that I have thought it necessary to give in an Appendix a brief sketch of its argument. We may at least _hope_ that this satire, which overflows with the deadliest contempt of Claudius, is not from the same pen which wrote for Nero his funeral oration. It has, however, been supposed (without sufficient grounds) to be the lost [Greek: Apokolokuntoois] which Seneca is said to have written on the apotheosis of Claudius. The very name is a bitter satire. It imagines the Emperor transformed, not into a God, but into a gourd–one of those “bloated gourds which sun their speckled bellies before the doors of the Roman peasants.” “The Senate decreed his _divinity_; Seneca translated it into _pumpkinity_” (Merivale, _Rom. Emp_. v. 601). The _Ludus_ begins by spattering mud on the memory of the divine Claudius; it ends with a shower of poetic roses over the glory of the diviner Nero!]
As has been the case not unfrequently in history, from the times of Tarquinius Priscus to those of Charles II., the death was concealed until everything had been prepared for the production of a successor. The palace was carefully watched; no one was even admitted into it except Agrippina’s most trusty partisans. The body was propped up with pillows; actors were sent for “by his own desire” to afford it some amusement; and priests and consuls were bidden to offer up their vows for the life of the dead. Giving out that the Emperor was getting better, Agrippina took care to keep Britannicus and his two sisters, Octavia and Antonia, under her own immediate eye. As though overwhelmed with sorrow she wept, and embraced them, and above all kept Britannicus by her side, kissing him with the exclamation “that he was the very image of his father,” and taking care that he should on no account leave her room. So the day wore on till it was the hour which the Chaldaeans declared would be the only lucky hour in that unlucky October day.
Noon came; the palace doors were suddenly thrown open: and Nero with Burrus at his side went out to the Praetorian cohort which was on guard. By the order of their commandant, they received him with cheers. A few only hesitated, looking round them and asking “Where was Britannicus?” Since, however, he was not to be seen, and no one stirred in his favour, they followed the multitude. Nero was carried in triumph to the camp, made the soldiers a short speech, and promised to each man of them a splendid donative. He was at once saluted Emperor. The Senate followed the choice of the soldiers, and the provinces made no demur. Divine honors were decreed to the murdered man, and preparations made for a funeral which was to rival in its splendour the one which Livia had ordered for Augustus. But the will–which beyond all doubt had provided for the succession of Britannicus–was quietly done away with, and its exact provisions were never known.
And on the first evening of his imperial power, Nero, well aware to whom he owed his throne, gave to the sentinel who came to ask him the pass for the night the grateful and significant watchword of “Optima Mater,”–“the best of mothers!”
CHAPTER XI.
NERO AND HIS TUTOR.
The imperial youth, whose destinies are now inextricably mingled with those of Seneca, was accompanied to the throne by the acclamations of the people. Wearied by the astuteness of an Augustus, the sullen wrath of a Tiberius, the mad ferocity of a Caius, the senile insensibility of a Claudius, they could not but welcome the succession of a bright and beautiful youth, whose fair hair floated over his shoulders, and whose features displayed the finest type of Roman beauty. There was nothing in his antecedents to give a sinister augury to his future development, and all classes alike dreamt of the advent of a golden age. We can understand their feelings if we compare them with those of our own countrymen when the sullen tyranny of Henry VIII. was followed by the youthful virtue and gentleness of Edward VI. Happy would it have been for Nero if his reign, like that of Edward, could have been cut short before the thick night of many crimes had settled down upon the promise of its dawn. For the first five years of Nero’s reign–the famous _Quinquennium Neronis_–were fondly regarded by the Romans as a period of almost ideal happiness. In reality, it was Seneca who was ruling in Nero’s, name. Even so excellent an Emperor as Trajan is said to have admitted “that no other prince had nearly equalled the praise of that period.” It is indeed probable that those years appeared to shine with an exaggerated splendour from the intense gloom which succeeded them; yet we can see in them abundant circumstances which were quite sufficient to inspire an enthusiasm of hope and joy. The young Nero was at first modest and docile. His opening speeches, written with all the beauty of thought and language which betrayed the _style_ of Seneca no less than his habitual sentiments, were full of glowing promises. All those things which had been felt to be injurious or oppressive he promised to eschew. He would not, he said, reserve to himself, as Claudius had done, the irresponsible decision in all matters of business; no office or dignity should be won from him by flattery or purchased by bribes; he would not confuse his own personal interests with those of the commonwealth; he would respect the ancient prerogatives of the Senate; he would confine his own immediate attention to the provinces and the army.
Nor were such promises falsified by his immediate conduct. The odious informers who had flourished in previous reigns were frowned upon and punished. Offices of public dignity were relieved from unjust and oppressive burdens. Nero prudently declined the gold and silver statues and other extravagant honours which were offered to him by the corrupt and servile Senate, but he treated that body, which, fallen as it was, continued still to be the main representative of constitutional authority, with favour and respect. Nobles and officials begun to breathe more freely, and the general sense of an intolerable tyranny was perceptibly relaxed. Severity was reserved for notorious criminals, and was only inflicted in a regular and authorized manner, when no one could doubt that it had been deserved. Above all, Seneca had disseminated an anecdote about his young pupil which tended more than any other circumstance to his wide spread popularity. England has remembered with gratitude and admiration the tearful reluctance of her youthful Edward to sign the death-warrant of Joan Boucher; Rome, accustomed to a cruel indifference to human life, regarded with something like transport the sense of pity which had made Nero, when asked to affix his signature to an order for execution, exclaim, “_How I wish that I did not know how to write_!”
It is admitted that no small share of the happiness of this period was due to the firmness of the honest Burrus, and the wise, high-minded precepts of Seneca. They deserve the amplest gratitude and credit for this happy interregnum, for they had no easy task to perform. Besides the difficulties which arose from the base and frivolous character of their pupil, besides the infinite delicacy which was requisite for the restraint of a youth who was absolute master of such gigantic destinies, they had the task of curbing the wild and imperious ambition of Agrippina, and of defeating the incessant intrigues of her many powerful dependents. Agrippina had no doubt persuaded herself that her crimes had been mainly committed in the interest of her son; but her conduct showed that she wished him to be a mere instrument in her hands. She wished to govern him, and had probably calculated on doing so by the assistance of Seneca, just as our own Queen Caroline completely managed George II. with the aid of Sir Robert Walpole. She rode in a litter with him; without his knowledge she ordered the poisoning of M. Silanus, a brother of her former victim, she goaded Narcissus to death, against his will; through her influence the Senate was sometimes assembled in the palace, and she took no pains to conceal from the senators that she was herself seated behind a curtain where she could hear every word of their deliberations;–nay, on one occasion, when Nero was about to give audience to an important Armenian legation, she had the audacity to enter the audience-chamber, and advance to take her seat by the side of the Emperor. Every one else was struck dumb with amazement, and even terror, at a proceeding so unusual; but Seneca, with ready and admirable tact, suggested to Nero that he should rise and meet his mother, thus obviating a public scandal under the pretext of filial affection.
But Seneca from the very first had been guilty of a fatal error in the education of his pupil. He had governed him throughout on the ruinous principle of _concession_. Nero was not devoid of talent; he had a decided turn for Latin versification, and the few lines of his composition which have come down to us, _bizarre_ and effected as they are, yet display a certain sense of melody and power of language. But his vivid imagination was accompained by a want of purpose; and Seneca, instead of trying to train him in habits of serious attention and sustained thought, suffered him to waste his best efforts in pursuits and amusements which were considered partly frivolous and partly disreputable, such as singing, painting, dancing, and driving. Seneca might have argued that there was, at any rate, no great harm in such employments, and that they probably kept Nero out of worse mischief. But we respect Nero the less for his indifferent singing and harp-twanging just as we respect Louis XVI. less for making very poor locks; and, if Seneca had adopted a loftier tone with his pupil from the first, Rome might have been spared the disgraceful folly of Nero’s subsequent buffooneries in the cities of Greece and the theatres of Rome. We may lay it down as an invariable axiom in all high education, that it is _never_ sensible to permit what is bad for the supposed sake of preventing what is worse. Seneca very probably persuaded himself that with a mind like Nero’s–the innate worthlessness of which he must early have recognised–success of any high description would be simply impossible. But this did not absolve him from attempting the only noble means by which success could, under any circumstances, be attainable. Let us, however, remember that his concessions to his pupil were mainly in matters which he regarded as indifferent–or, at the worst, as discreditable–rather than as criminal; and that his mistake probably arose from an error in judgment far more than from any deficiency in moral character.
Yet it is clear that, even intellectually, Nero was the worse for this laxity of training. We have already seen that, in his maiden-speech before the Senate, every one recognized the hand of Seneca, and many observed with a sigh that this was the first occasion on which an Emperor had not been able, at least to all appearance, to address the Senate in his own words and with his own thoughts. Tiberius, as an orator, had been dignified and forcible; Claudius had been learned and polished; even the disturbed reason of Caligula had not been wanting in a capacity for delivering forcible and eloquent harangues; but Nero’s youth had been frittered away in paltry and indecorus accomplishments, which had left him neither time nor inclination for weightier and nobler pursuits.
The fame of Seneca has, no doubt, suffered grieviously from the subsequent infamy of his pupil; and it is obvious that the dislike of Tacitus to his memory is due to his connexion with Nero. Now, even though the tutor’s system had not been so wise as, when judged by an inflexible standard, it might have been, it is yet clearly unjust to make him responsible for the depravity of his pupil; and it must be remembered, to Seneca’s eternal honour, that the evidence of facts, the testimony of contemporaries, and even the grudging admission of Tacitus himself, establishes in his favour that whatever wisdom and moderation characterized the earlier years of Nero’s reign were due to his counsels; that he enjoyed the cordial esteem of the virtuous Burrus; that he helped to check the sanguinary audacities of Agrippina; that the writings which he addressed to Nero, and the speeches which he wrote for him, breathed the loftiest counsels; and that it was not until he was wholly removed from power and influence that Nero, under the fierce impulses of despotic power, developed those atrocious tendencies of which the seeds had long been latent in his disposition. An ancient writer records the tradition that Seneca very early observed in Nero a savagery of disposition which he could not wholly eradicate; and that to his intimate friends he used to observe that, “when once the lion tasted human blood, his innate cruelty would return.”
But while we give Seneca this credit, and allow that his _intentions_ were thoroughly upright, we cannot but impugn his _judgment_ for having thus deliberately adopted the morality of expedience; and we believe that to this cause, more than to any other, was due the extent of his failure and the misery of his life. We may, indeed, be permitted to doubt whether Nero himself–a vain and loose youth, the son of bad parents, and heir to boundless expectations–would, under any circumstances, have grown up much better than he did; but it is clear that Seneca might have been held in infinitely higher honour but for the share which he had in his education. Had Seneca been as firm and wise as Socrates, Nero in all probability would not have been much worse than Alcibiades. If the tutor had set before his pupil no ideal but the very highest, if he had inflexibly opposed to the extent of his ability every tendency which was dishonourable and wrong, he might _possibly_ have been rewarded by success, and have earned the indelible gratitude of mankind; and if he had failed he would at least have failed nobly, and have carried with him into a calm and honourable retirement the respect, if not the affection, of his imperial pupil. Nay, even if he had failed _completely_, and lost his life in the attempt, it would have been infinitely better both for him and for mankind. Even Homer might have taught him that “it is better to die than live in sin.” At any rate he might have known from study and observation that an education founded on compromise must always and necessarily fail. It must fail because it overlooks that great eternal law of retribution for and continuity in evil, which is illustrated by every single history of individuals and of nations. And the education which Seneca gave to Nero–noble as it was in many respects, and eminent as was its partial and temporary success–was yet an education of compromises. Alike in the studies of Nero’s boyhood and the graver temptations of his manhood, he acted on the foolishly-fatal principle that
“Had the wild oat not been sown,
The soil left barren scarce had grown, The grain whereby a man may live.”
Any Christian might have predicted the result; one would have thought that even a pagan philosopher might have been enlightened enough to observe it. We often quote the lines–
“The child is father of the man,”
and
“Just as the twig is bent the tree inclines.”
But the ancients were quite as familiar with the same truth under other images. “The cask,” wrote Horace, “will long retain the odour of that which has once been poured into it when new.” Quintilian, describing the depraved influences which surrounded even the infancy of a Roman child, said, “From these arise _first familiarity, then nature_.”
No one has laid down the principle more emphatically than Seneca himself. Take, for instance, the following passage from his Letters, on evil conversation. “The conversation,” he says, “of these men is very injurious; for, even if it does no immediate harm, it leaves its seeds in the mind, and follows us even when we have gone from the speakers,–a plague sure to spring up in future resurrection. Just as those who have heard a symphony carry in their ears the tune and sweetness of the song which entangles their thoughts, and does not suffer them to give their whole energy to serious matters; so the conversation of flatterers and of those who praise evil things, lingers longer in the mind than the time of hearing it. Nor is it easy to shake out of the soul a sweet sound; it pursues us, and lingers with us, and at perpetual intervals recurs. Our ears therefore must be closed to evil words, and that to the very first we hear. For when they have once begun and been admitted, they acquire more and more audacity;” and so he adds a little afterwards, “our days flow on, and irreparable life passes beyond our reach.” Yet he who wrote these noble words was not only a flatterer to his imperial pupil, but is charged with having deliberately encouraged him in a foolish passion for a freedwoman named Acte, into which Nero fell. It was of course his duty to recall the wavering affections of the youthful Emperor to his betrothed Octavia, the daughter of Claudius, to whom he had been bound by every tie of honour and affection, and his union with whom gave some shadow of greater legitimacy to his practical usurpation. But princes rarely love the wives to whom they owe any part of their elevation. Henry VII. treated Elizabeth of York with many slights. The union of William III. with Mary was overshadowed by her superior claim to the royal power; and Nero from the first regarded with aversion, which ended in assassination, the poor young orphan girl who recalled to the popular memory his slender pretensions to hereditary empire, and whom he regarded as a possible rival, if her cowed and plastic nature should ever become a tool in the hands of more powerful intriguers. But we do not hear of any attempt on Seneca’s part to urge upon Nero the fulfillment of this high duty, and we find him sinking into the degraded position of an accomplice with young profligates like Otho, as the confident of a dishonourable love. Such conduct, which would have done discredit to a mere courtier, was to a Stoic disgraceful. But the principle which led to it is the very principle to which we have been pointing,–the principle of moral compromise, the principle of permitting and encouraging what is evil in the vain hope of thereby preventing what is worse. It is hardly strange that Seneca should have erred in this way, for compromise was the character of his entire life. He appears to have set before himself the wholly impossible task of being both a genuine philosopher and a statesman under the Caesars. He prided himself on being not only a philosopher, but also a man of the world, and the consequence was, that in both capacities he failed. It was as true in Paganism as it is in Christianity, that a man _must_ make his choice between duty and interest–between the service of Mammon and the service of God. No man ever gained anything but contempt and ruin by incessantly halting between two opinions.
And by not taking that lofty line of duty which a Zeno or an Antisthenes would have taken, Seneca became more or less involved in some of the most dreadful events of Nero’s reign. Every one of the terrible doubts under which his reputation has suffered arose from his having permitted the principle of expedience to supercede the laws of virtue. One or two of these events we must briefly narrate.
We have already pointed out that the Nemesis which for so many years had been secretly dogging the footsteps of Agrippina made her tremble under the weight of its first cruel blows when she seemed to have attained the highest summit of her ambition. Very early indeed Nero began to be galled and irritated by the insatiate assumption and swollen authority of “the best of mothers.” The furious reproaches which she heaped upon him when she saw in Acte a possible rival to her power drove him to take refuge in the facile and unphilosophic worldliness of Seneca’s concessions, and goaded him almost immediately afterwards into an atrocious crime. He naturally looked on Britannicus, the youthful son of Claudius, with even more suspicion and hatred than that with which he regarded Octavia. Kings have rarely been able to abstain from acts of severity against those who might become claimants to the throne. The feelings of King John towards Prince Arthur, of Henry IV. towards the Earl of March, of Mary towards Lady Jane Grey, of Elizabeth towards Mary Stuart, of King James towards Lady Arabella Stuart, resembled, but probably by no means equalled in intensity, those of Nero towards his kinsman and adoptive brother. To show him any affection was a dangerous crime, and it furnished a sufficient cause for immediate removal if any attendant behaved towards him with fidelity. Such a line of treatment foreshadowed the catastrophe which was hastened by the rage of Agrippina. She would go, she said, and take with her to the camp the noble boy who was now of full age to undertake those imperial duties which a usurper was exercising in virtue of crimes which she was now prepared to confess. Then let the mutilated Burrus and the glib-tongued Seneca see whether they could be a match for the son of Claudius and the daughter of Germanicus. Such language, uttered with violent gestures and furious imprecations, might well excite the alarm of the timid Nero. And that alarm was increased by a recent circumstance, which showed that all the ancestral spirit was not dead in the breast of Britannicus. During the festivities of the Saturnalia, which were kept by the ancients with all the hilarity of the modern Christmas, Nero had been elected by lot as “governor of the feast,” and, in that capacity, was entitled to issue his orders to the guests. To the others he issued trivial mandates which would not make them blush; but Britannicus in violation of every principle of Roman decorum, was ordered to stand up in the middle and sing a song. The boy, inexperienced as yet even in sober banquets, and wholly unaccustomed to drunken convivialities, might well have faltered; but he at once rose, and with a steady voice began a strain–probably the magnificent wail of Andromache over the fall of Troy, which has been preserved to us from a lost play of Ennius–in which he indicated his own disgraceful ejection from his hereditary rights. His courage and his misfortunes woke in the guests a feeling of pity which night and wine made them less careful to disguise. From that moment the fate of Britannicus was sealed. Locusta, the celebrated poisoner of ancient Rome, was summoned to the councils of Nero to get rid of Britannicus, as she had already been summoned to those of his mother when she wished to disembarrass herself of Britannicus’s father. The main difficulty was to avoid discovery, since nothing was eaten or drunk at the imperial table till it had been tasted by the _praegustator_. To avoid this difficulty a very hot draught was given to Britannicus, and when he wished for something cooler a swift and subtle poison was dropped into the cold water with which it was tempered. The boy drank, and instantly sank from his seat, gasping and speechless. The guests started up in consternation, and fixed their eyes on Nero. He with the utmost coolness assured them that it was merely a fit of epilepsy, to which his brother was accustomed, and from which he would soon recover. The terror and agitation of Agrippina showed to every one that she at least was guiltless of this dark deed; but the unhappy Octavia, young as she was, and doubly terrible on every ground as the blow must have been to her, sat silent and motionless, having already learnt by her misfortunes the awful necessity for suppressing under an impassive exterior her affections and sorrows, her hopes and fears. In the dead of night, amid storms and murky rain, which were thought to indicate the wrath of heaven, the last of the Claudii was hastily and meanly hurried into a dishonourable grave.
We may believe that in this crime Seneca had no share whatever, but we can hardly believe that he was ignorant of it after it had been committed, or that he had no share in the intensely hypocritical edict in which Nero bewailed the fact of his adoptive brother’s death, excused his hurried funeral, and threw himself on the additional indulgence and protection of the Senate. Nero showed the consciousness of guilt by the immense largesses which he distributed to the most powerful of his friends, “Nor were there wanting men,” says Tacitus, in a most significant manner, “_who accused certain people, notorious for their high professions, of having at that period divided among them villas and houses as though they had been so much spoil_.” There can hardly be a doubt that the great historian intends by this remark to point at Seneca, to whom he tries to be fair, but whom he could never quite forgive for his share in the disgraces of Nero’s reign. That avarice was one of Seneca’s temptations is too probable; that expediency was a guiding principle of his conduct is but too evident; and for a man with such a character to rebut an innuendo is never an easy task. Nay more, it was _after_ this foul event, at the close of Nero’s first year, that Seneca addressed him in the extravagant and glowing language of his treatise on Clemency. “The quality of mercy,” and the duty of princes to practise it, has never been more eloquently extolled; but it is accompanied by a fulsome flattery which has in it something painfully grotesque as addressed by a philosopher to one whom he knew to have been guilty, that very year, of an inhuman fratricide. Imagine some Jewish Pharisee,–a Nicodemus or a Gamaliel–pronouncing an eulogy on the tenderness of a Herod, and you have some picture of the appearance which Seneca’s consistency must have worn in the eyes of his contemporaries.
This event took place A.D. 55, in the first year of Nero’s _Quinquennium_, and the same year was nearly signalized by the death of his mother. A charge of pretended conspiracy was invented against her, and it is probable that but for the intervention of Burrus, who with Seneca was appointed to examine into the charge, she would have fallen a very sudden victim to the cowardly credulity and growing hatred of her son. The extraordinary and eloquent audacity of her defence created a reaction in her favour, and secured the punishment of her accusers. But the ties of affection could not long unite two such wicked and imperious natures as those of Agrippina and her son. All history shows that there can be no real love between souls exceptionally wicked, and that this is still more impossible when the alliance between them has been sealed by a complicity in crime. Nero had now fallen into a deep infatuation for Poppaea Sabina, the beautiful wife of Otho, and she refused him her hand so long as he was still under the control of his mother. At this time Agrippina, as the just consequence of her many crimes, was regarded by all classes with a fanaticism of hatred which in Poppaea Sabina was intensified by manifest self-interest. Nero, always weak, had long regarded his mother with real terror and disgust, and he scarcely needed the urgency of constant application to make him long to get rid of her. But the daughter of Germanicus could not be openly destroyed, while her own precautions helped to secure her against secret assassination. It only remained to compass her death by treachery. Nero had long compelled her to live in suburban retirement, and had made no attempt to conceal the open rapture which existed between them. Anicetus, admiral of the fleet at Misenum, and a former instructor of Nero, suggested the expedient of a pretended public reconciliation, in virtue of which Agrippina should be invited to Baiae, and on her return should be placed on board a vessel so constructed as to come to pieces by the removal of bolts. The disaster might then be attributed to a mere naval accident, and Nero might make the most ostentatious display of his affection and regret.
The invitation was sent, and a vessel specially decorated was ordered to await her movements. But, either from suspicion or from secret information, she declined to avail herself of it, and was conveyed to Baiae in a litter. The effusion of hypocritical affection with which she was received, the unusual tenderness and honour with which she was treated, the earnest gaze, the warm embrace, the varied conversation, removed her suspicions, and she consented to return in the vessel of honour. As though for the purpose of revealing the crime, the night was starry and the sea calm. The ship had not sailed far, and Crepereius Gallus, one of her friends, was standing near the helm, while a lady named Acerronia was seated at her feet as she reclined, and both were vieing with each other in the warmth of their congratulations upon the recent interview, when a crash was heard, and the canopy above them which had been weighted with a quantity of lead, was suddenly let go. Crepereius was crushed to death upon the spot; Agrippina and Acerronia were saved by the projecting sides of the couch on which they were resting; in the hurry and alarm, as accomplices were mingled with a greater number who were innocent of the plot, the machinery of the treacherous vessel failed. Some of the rowers rushed to one side of the ship, hoping in that manner to sink it, but here too their councils were divided and confused. Acerronia, in the selfish hope of securing assistance, exclaimed that she was Agrippina, and was immediately despatched with oars and poles; Agrippina, silent and unrecognized, received a wound upon the shoulder, but succeeded in keeping herself afloat till she was picked up by fishermen and carried in safety to her villa.
The hideous attempt from which she had been thus miraculously rescued did not escape her keen intuition, accustomed as it was to deeds of guilt; but, seeing that her only chance of safety rested in dissimulation and reticense, she sent her freedman Agerinus to tell her son that by the mercy of heaven she had escaped from a terrible accident, but to beg him not to be alarmed, and not to come to see her because she needed rest.
The news filled Nero with the wildest terror, and the expectation of an immediate revenge. In horrible agitation and uncertainty he instantly required the presence of Burrus and Seneca. Tacitus doubts whether they may not have been already aware of what he had attempted, and Dion, to whose gross calumnies, however, we need pay no attention, declares that Seneca had frequently urged Nero to the deed, either in the hope of overshadowing his own guilt, or of involving Nero in a crime which should hasten his most speedy destruction at the hands of gods and men. In the absence of all evidence we may with perfect confidence acquit the memory of these eminent men from having gone so far as this.
It must have been a strange and awful scene. The young man, for Nero was but twenty-two years old, poured into the ears their tumult of his agitation and alarm. White with fear, weak with dissipation, and tormented by the furies of a guilty conscience, the wretched youth looked from one to another of his aged ministers. A long and painful pause ensued. If they dissuaded him in vain from the crime which he meditated their lives would have been in danger; and perhaps they sincerely thought that things had gone so far that, unless Agrippina were anticipated, Nero would be destroyed. Seneca was the first to break that silence of anguish by inquiring of Burrus whether the soldiery could be entrusted to put her to death. His reply was that the praetorians would do nothing against a daughter of Germanicus and that Anicetus should accomplish what he had promised. Anicetus showed himself prompt to crime, and Nero thanked him in a rapture of gratitude. While the freedman Agerinus was delivering to Nero his mother’s message, Anicetus dropped a dagger at his feet, declared that he had caught him in the very act of attempting the Emperor’s assassination, and hurried off with a band of soldiers to punish Agrippina as the author of the crime.
The multitude meanwhile were roaming in wild excitement along the shore; their torches were seen glimmering in evident commotion about the scene of the calamity, where some were wading into the water in search of the body, and others were shouting incoherent questions and replies. At the rumour of Agrippina’s escape they rushed off in a body to her villa to express their congratulations, where they were dispersed by the soldiers of Anicetus, who had already token possession of it. Scattering or seizing the slaves who came in their way, and bursting their passage from door to door, they found the Empress in a dimly-lighted chamber, attended only by a single handmaid. “Dost thou too desert me?” exclaimed the wretched woman to her servant, as she rose to slip away. In silent determination the soldiers surrounded her couch, and Anicetus was the first to strike her with a stick. “Strike my womb,” she cried to him faintly, as he drew his sword, “for it bore Nero.” The blow of Anicetus was the signal for her immediate destruction: she was dispatched with many wounds, and was buried that night at Misenum on a common couch and with a mean funeral. Such an end, many years previously, this sister, and wife, and mother of emperors had anticipated and despised; for when the Chaldaeans had assured her that her son would become Emperor, and would murder her, she is said to have exclaimed, “Occidat dum imperet,” “Let him slay me if he but reign.”
It only remained to account for the crime, and offer for it such lying defences as were most likely to gain credit. Flying to Naples from a scene which had now become awful to him,–for places do not change as men’s faces change, and, besides this, his disturbed conscience made him fancy that he heard from the hill of Misenum the blowing of a ghostly trumpet and wailings about his mother’s tomb in the hours of night,–he sent from thence a letter to the Senate, saying that his mother had been punished for an attempt upon his life, and adding a list of her crimes, real and imaginary, the narrative of her _accidental_ shipwreck, and his opinion that her death was a public blessing. The author of this shameful document was Seneca, and in composing it he reached the nadir of his moral degradation. Even the lax morality of a most degenerate age condemned him for calmly sitting down to decorate with the graces of rhetoric and antithesis an atrocity too deep for the powers of indignation. A Seneca could stoop to write what a Thrasea Paetus could scarcely stoop to hear; for in the meeting of the Senate at which the letter was recited, Thrasea rose in indignation, and went straight home rather than seem to sanction by his presence the adulation of a matricide.
And the composition of that guily, elaborate, shameful letter was the last prominent act of Seneca’s public life.
CHAPTER XII.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
Nor was it unnatural that it should be. Moral precepts, philosophic guidance were no longer possible to one whose compliances or whose timidity had led him so far as first to sanction matricide, and then to defend it. He might indeed be still powerful to recommend principles of common sense and political expediency, but the loftier lessons of Stoicism, nay, even the better utterances of a mere ordinary Pagan morality, could henceforth only fall from his lips with something of a hollow ring. He might interfere, as we know he did, to render as innocuous as possible the pernicious vanity which made Nero so ready to degrade his imperial rank by public appearances on the orchestra or in the race-course, but he could hardly address again such noble teachings as that of the treatise on Clemency to one whom, on grounds of political expediency, he had not dissuaded from the treacherous murder of a mother, who, whatever her enormities, yet for his sake had sold her very soul.
Although there may have been a strong suspicion that foul play had been committed, the actual facts and details of the death of Agrippina would rest between Nero and Seneca as a guilty secret, in the guilt of which Seneca himself must have his share. Such a position of things was the inevitable death-blow, not only to all friendship, but to all confidence, and ultimately to all intercourse. We see in sacred history that Joab’s participation in David’s guilty secret gave him the absolute mastery over his own sovereign; we see repeatedly in profane history that the mutual knowledge of some crime is the invariable cause of deadly hatred between a subject and a king. Such feelings as King John may be supposed to have had to Hubert de Burgh, or King Richard III. to Sir James Tyrrel, or King James I. to the Earl of Somerset, such probably, in still more virulent intensity, were the feelings of Nero towards his whilome “guide, philosopher, and friend.”
For Nero very soon learnt that Seneca was no longer _necessary_ to him. For a time he lingered in Campania, guiltily dubious as to the kind of reception that awaited him in the capital. The assurances of the vile crew which surrounded him soon made that fear wear off, and when he plucked up the courage to return to his palace, he might himself have been amazed at the effusion of infamous loyalty and venal acclamation with which he was received. All Rome poured itself forth to meet him; the Senate appeared in festal robes with their wives and girls and boys in long array; seats and scaffoldings were built up along the road by which he had to pass, as though the populace had gone forth to see a triumph. With haughty mein, the victor of a nation of slaves, he ascended the Capitol, gave thanks to the gods, and went home to betray henceforth the full perversity of a nature which the reverence for his mother, such as it was, had hitherto in part restrained. But the instincts of the populace were suppressed rather than eradicated. They hung a sack from his statue by night in allusion to the old punishment of parricides, who were sentenced to be flung into the sea, tied up in a sack with a serpent, a monkey, and a cock. They exposed an infant in the Forum with a tablet on which was written, “I refuse to rear thee, lest thou shouldst slay thy mother.” They scrawled upon the blank walls of Rome an iambic line which reminded all who read it that Nero, Orestes, and Alcmaeon were murderers of their mothers. Even Nero must have been well aware that he presented a hideous spectacle in the eyes of all who had the faintest shade of righteousness among the people whom he ruled.
All this took place in A.D. 59, and we hear no more of Seneca till the year 62, a year memorable for the death of Burrus, who had long been his honest, friendly, and faithful colleague. In these dark times, when all men seemed to be speaking in a whisper, almost every death of a conspicuous and high-minded man, if not caused by open violence, falls under the suspicion of secret poison. The death of Burrus may have been due (from the description) to diphtheria, but the popular voice charged Nero with having hastened his death by a pretended remedy, and declared that, when the Emperor visited his sick bed, the dying man turned away from his inquiries with the laconic answer, “I am well.”
His death was regretted, not only from the memory of his virtues, but also from the fact that Nero appointed two men as his successors, of whom the one, Fenius Rufus, was honorable but indolent; the other and more powerful, Sofonius Tigellinus had won for himself among cruel and shameful associates a pre-eminence of hatred and of shame.
However faulty and inconsistent Seneca may have been, there was at any rate no possibility that he should divide with a Tigellinus the direction of his still youthful master. He was by no means deceived as to the position in which he stood, and the few among Nero’s followers in whom any spark of honour was left informed him of the incessant calumnies which were used to undermine his influence. Tigellinus and his friends dwelt on his enormous wealth and his magnificent villas and gardens, which could only have been acquired with ulterior objects, and which threw into the shade the splendour of the Emperor himself. They tried to kindle the inflammable jealousies of Nero’s feeble mind by representing Seneca as attempting to rival him in poetry, and as claiming the entire credit of his eloquence, while he mocked his divine singing, and disparaged his accomplishments as a harper and charioteer because he himself was unable to acquire them. Nero, they urged was a boy no longer; let him get rid of his schoolmaster, and find sufficient instruction in the example of his ancestors.
Foreseeing how such arguments must end; Seneca requested an interview with Nero; begged to be suffered to retire altogether from public life; pleaded age and increasing infirmities as an excuse for desiring a calm retreat; and offered unconditionally to resign the wealth and honours which had excited the cupidity of his enemies, but which were simply due to Nero’s unexampled liberality during the eight years of his government, towards one whom he had regarded as a benefactor and a friend. But Nero did not choose to let Seneca escape so lightly. He argued that, being still young, he could not spare him, and that to accept his offers would not be at all in accordance with his fame for generosity. A proficient in the imperial art of hiding detestation under deceitful blandishments, Nero ended the interview with embraces and assurances of friendship. Seneca thanked him–the usual termination, as Tacitus bitterly adds, of interviews with a ruler–but nevertheless altered his entire manner of life, forbade his friends to throng to his levees, avoided all companions, and rarely appeared in public–wishing it to be believed that he was suffering from weak health, or was wholly occupied in the pursuit of philosophy. He well knew the arts of courts, for in his book on Anger he has told an anecdote of one who, being asked how he had managed to attain so rare a gift as old age in a palace, replied, “By submitting to injuries, and _returning thanks for them_.” But he must have known that his life hung upon a thread, for in the very same year an attempt was made to involve him in a charge of treason as one of the friends of C. Calpurnius Piso, an illustrious nobleman whose wealth and ability made him an object of jealousy and suspicion, though he was naturally unambitious and devoid of energy. The attempt failed at the time, and Seneca was able triumphantly to refute the charge of any treasonable design. But the fact of such a charge being made showed how insecure was the position of any man of eminence under the deepening tyranny of Nero, and it precipitated the conspiracy which two years afterwards was actually formed.
Not long after the death of Burrus, when Nero began to add sacrilege to his other crimes, Seneca made one more attempt to retire from Rome; and, when permission was a second time refused, he feigned a severe illness, and confined himself to his chamber. It was asserted, and believed, that about this time Nero made an attempt to poison him by the instrumentality of his freedman Cleonicus, which was only defeated by the confession of an accomplice or by the abstemious habits of the philosopher who now took nothing but bread and fruit, and never quenched his thirst except out of the running stream.
It was during those two years of Seneca’s seclusion and disgrace that an event happened of imperishable interest. On the orgies of a shameful court, on the supineness of a degenerate people, there burst–as upon the court of Charles II.–a sudden lightning-flash of retribution. In its character, in its extent, in the devastation and anguish of which it was the cause, in the improvements by which it was followed, in the lying origin to which it was attributed, even in the general circumstances of the period and character of the reign in which it happened, there is a close and singular analogy between the Great Fire of London in 1666 and the Great Fire of Rome in 64. Beginning in the crowded part of the city, under the Palatine and Caelian Hills, it raged, first for six, and then again for three days, among the inflammable material of booths and shops, and driven along by a furious wind, amid feeble and ill-directed efforts to check its course, it burst irresistibly over palaces, temples, and porticoes, and amid the narrow tortuous streets of old Rome, involving in a common destruction the most magnificent works of ancient art, the choicest manuscripts of ancient literature, and the most venerable monuments of ancient superstition. In a few touches of inimitable compression, such as the stern genius of the Latin language permits, but which are too condensed for direct translation, Tacitus has depicted the horror of the scene,–wailing of panic-stricken women, the helplessness of the very aged and the very young, the passionate eagerness for themselves and for others, the dragging along of the feeble or the waiting for them, the lingering and the hurry, the common and inextricable confusion. Many, while they looked backward, were cut off by the flames in front or at the sides; if they sought some neighboring refuge, they found it in the grasp of the conflagration; if they hurried to some more distant spot, that too was found to be involved in the same calamity. At last, uncertain what to seek or what to avoid, they crowded the streets, they lay huddled together in the fields. Some, having lost all their possessions, died from the want of daily food; and others, who might have escaped died of a broken heart from the anguish of being bereaved of those whom they had been unable to rescue; while, to add to the universal horror, it was believed that all attempts to repress the flames were checked by authoritive prohibition; nay more, that hired incendiaries were seen flinging firebrands in new directions, either because they had been bidden to do so, or that they might exercise their rapine undisturbed.
The historians and anecdotists of the time, whose accounts must be taken for what they are worth, attribute to Nero the origin of the conflagration; and it is certain that he did not return to Rome until the fire had caught the galleries of his palace. In vain did he use every exertion to assist the homeless and ruined population; in vain did he order food to be sold to them at a price unprecedentedly low, and throw open to them the monuments of Agrippa, his own gardens, and a multitude of temporary sheds. A rumour had been spread that, during the terrible unfolding of that great “flower of flame,” he had mounted to the roof of his distant villa, and delighted with the beauty of the spectacle, exulting in the safe sensation of a new excitement, had dressed himself in theatrical attire, and sung to his harp a poem on the burning of Troy. Such a heartless mixture of buffoonery and affectation had exasperated the people too deeply for forgiveness, and Nero thought it necessary to draw off the general odium into a new channel, since neither his largesses nor any other popular measures succeeded in removing from himself the ignominy of this terrible suspicion. What follows is so remarkable, and, to a Christian reader, so deeply interesting, that I will give it in the very words of that great historian whom I have been so closely following.
“Therefore, to get rid of this report, Nero trumped up an accusation against a sect, detested for their atrocities, whom the common people called Christians, and inflicted on them the most recondite punishments. Christ, the founder of this sect, had been capitally punished by the Procurator Pontius Pilate, in the reign of Tiberius; and this damnable superstition, repressed for the present, was again breaking out, not only through Judaea, where the evil originated, but even through the City, whither from all regions all things that are atrocious or shameful flow together and gain a following. Those, therefore, were first arrested who confessed their religion, and then on their evidence a vast multitude were condemned, not so much on the charge of incendiarism, as for their hatred towards the human race. And mockery was added to their death; for they were covered in the skins of wild beasts and were torn to death by dogs, or crucified, or set apart for burning, and after the close of the day were reserved for the purpose of nocturnal illumination. Nero lent his own gardens for the spectacle, and gave a chariot-race, mingling with the people in the costume of a charioteer, or driving among them in his chariot; by which conduct he raised a feeling of commiseration towards the sufferers, guilty though they were, and deserving of the extremest penalties, as though they were being exterminated, not for the public interests, but to gratify the savage cruelty of one man.”
Such are the brief but deeply pathetic particulars which have come down to us respecting the first great persecution of the Christians, and such must have been the horrid events of which Seneca was a contemporary, and probably an actual eye-witness, in the very last year of his life. Profoundly as in all likelihood he must have despised the very name of Christian, a heart so naturally mild and humane as his must have shuddered at the monstrous cruelties devised against the unhappy votaries of this new religion. But to the relations of Christianity with the Pagan world we shall return in a subsequent chapter and we must now hasten to the end of our biography.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE DEATH OF SENECA.
The false charge which had been brought against Seneca, and in which the name of Piso had been involved, tended to urge that nobleman and his friends into a real and formidable conspiracy. Many men of influence and distinction joined in it, and among others Annaeus Lucanus, the celebrated poet-nephew of Seneca, and Fenius Rufus the colleague of Tigellinus in the command of the imperial guards. The plot was long discussed, and many were admitted into the secret, which was nevertheless marvellously well kept. One of the most eager conspirators was Subrius Flavus, an officer of the guards, who suggested the plan of stabbing Nero as he sang upon the stage, or of attacking him as he went about without guards at night in the galleries of his burning palace. Flavus is even said to have cherished the design of subsequently murdering Piso likewise, and of offering the imperial power to Seneca, with the full cognisance of the philosopher himself.[35] However this may have been–and the story has no probability–many schemes were discussed and rejected, from the difficulty of finding a man sufficiently bold and sufficiently in earnest to put his own life to such imminent risk. While things were still under discussion, the plot was nearly ruined by the information of Volusius Proculus, an admiral of the fleet, to whom it had been mentioned by a freedwoman of the name of Ephicharis. Although no sufficient evidence could be adduced against her, the conspirators thought it advisable to hasten matters, and one of them, a senator named Scaevinus, undertook the dangerous task of assassination. Plautius Lateranus, the cousul-elect, was to pretend to offer a petition, in which he was to embrace the Emperor’s knees and throw him to the ground, and then Scaevinus was to deal the fatal blow. The theatrical conduct of Scaevinus–who took an antique dagger from the Temple of Safety, made his will, ordered the dagger to be sharpened, sat down to an unusually luxurious banquet, manumitted or made presents to his slaves, showed great agitation, and finally ordered ligaments for wounds to be prepared,–awoke the suspicions of one of his freedmen named Milichus, who hastened to claim a reward for revealing his suspicions. Confronted with Milichus, Scaevinus met and refuted his accusations with the greatest firmness; but when Milichus mentioned among other things that, the day before, Scaevinus had held a long and secret conversation with another friend of Piso named Natalis, and when Natalis, on being summoned, gave a very different account of the subject of this conversation from that which Scaevinus had given, they were both put in chains; and, unable to endure the threats and the sight of tortures, revealed the entire conspiracy. Natalis was the first to mentioned the name of Piso, and he added the hated name of Seneca, either because he had been the confidential messenger between the two, or because he knew that he could not do a greater favour to Nero than by giving him the opportunity of injuring a man whom he had long sought every possible opportunity to crush. Scaevinus, with equal weakness, perhaps because he thought that Natalis had left nothing to reveal, mentioned the names of the others, and among them of Lucan, whose complicity in the plot would undoubtedly tend to give greater probability to the supposed guilt of Seneca. Lucan, after long denying all knowledge of the design, corrupted by the promise of impunity, was guilty of the incredible baseness of making up for the slowness of his confession by its completeness, and of naming among the conspirators his chief friend Gallus and Pollio, and his own mother Atilla. The woman Ephicharis, slave though she had once been, alone showed the slightest constancy, and, by her brave unshaken reticence under the most excruciating and varied tortures, put to shame the pusillanimous treachery of senators and knights. On the second day, when, with limbs too dislocated to admit of her standing, she was again brought to the presence of her executioners, she succeeded, by a sudden movement, in strangling herself with her own girdle.
[Footnote 35: See Juv. _Sat_. viii. 212.]
In the hurry and alarm of the moment the slightest show of resolution would have achieved the object of the conspiracy. Fenius Rufus had not yet been named among the conspirators, and as he sat by the side of the Emperor, and presided over the torture of his associates, Subrius Flavus made him a secret sign to inquire whether even then and there he should stab Nero. Rufus not only made a sign of dissent, but actually held the hand of Subrius as it was grasping the hilt of his sword. Perhaps it would have been better for him if he had not done so, for it was not likely that the numerous conspirators would long permit the same man to be at once their accomplice and the fiercest of their judges. Shortly afterwards, as he was urging and threatening, Scaevinus remarked, with a quiet smile, “that nobody knew more about the matter than he did himself, and that he had better show his gratitude to so excellent a prince by telling all he knew.” The confusion and alarm of Rufus betrayed his consciousness of guilt; he was seized and bound on the spot, and subsequently put to death.
Meanwhile the friends of Piso were urging to take some bold and sudden step, which, if it did not succeed in retrieving his fortunes, would at least shed lustre on his death. But his somewhat slothful nature, weakened still further by a luxurious life, was not to be aroused, and he calmly awaited the end. It was customary among the Roman Emperors at this period to avoid the disgrace and danger of public executions by sending a messenger to a man’s house, and ordering him to put himself to death by whatever means he preferred. Some raw recruits–for Nero dared not intrust any veterans with the duty–brought the mandate to Piso, who proceeded to make a will full of disgraceful adulation towards Nero, opened his veins, and died. Plautius Lateranus was not even allowed the poor privilege of choosing his own death, but, without time even to embrace his children, was hurried off to a place set apart for the punishment of slaves, and there died, without a word, by the sword of a tribune whom he knew to be one his own accomplices.
Lucan, in the prime of his life and the full bloom of his genius, was believed to have joined the plot from his indignation at the manner in which Nero’s jealousy had repressed his poetic fame, and forbidden him the opportunity of public rectitations. He too opened his veins; and as he felt the deathful chill creeping upwards from the extremities of his limbs, he recited some verses from his own “Pharsalia,” in which he had described the similar death of the soldier Lycidas. They were his last words. His mother Atilla, whom to his everlasting infamy, he had betrayed, was passed over as a victim too insignificant for notice, and was neither pardoned nor punished.
But, of all the many deaths which were brought about by this unhappy and ill-managed conspiracy, none caused more delight to Nero than that of Seneca, whom he was now able to dispatch by the sword, since he had been unable to do so by secret poison. What share Seneca really had in the conspiracy is unknown. If he were really cognisant of it, he must have acted with consummate tact, for no particle of convincing evidence was adduced against him. All that even Natalis could relate was, that when Piso had sent him to complain to Seneca of his not admitting Piso to more of his intercourse, Seneca had replied “that it was better for them both to hold aloof from each other, but that his own safety depended on that of Piso.” A tribune was sent to ask Seneca as to the truth of this story, and found,–which was in itself regarded as a suspicious circumstance,–that on that very day he had returned from Campania to a villa four miles from the city. The tribune arrived in the evening, and surrounded the villa with soldiers. Seneca was at supper, with his wife Paulina and two friends. He entirely denied the truth of the evidence, and said that “the only reason which he had assigned to Piso for seeing so little of him was his weak health and love of retirement. Nero, who knew how little prone he was to flattery, might judge whether or no it was likely that he, a man of consular rank, would prefer the safety of a man of private station to his own.” Such was the message which the tribune took back to Nero, whom he found sitting with his dearest and most detestable advisers, his wife Poppaea and his minister Tigellinus. Nero asked “whether Seneca was preparing a voluntary death.” On the tribune replying that he showed no gloom or terror in his language or countenance, Nero ordered that he should at once be bidden to die. The message was taken, and Seneca, without any sign of alarm, quietly demanded leave to revise his will. This was refused him, and he then turned to his friends with the remark that, as he was unable to reward their merits as they had deserved, he would bequeath to them the only, and yet the most precious, possession left to him, namely, the example of his life, and if they were mindful of it they would win the reputation alike for integrity and for faithful friendship. At the same time he checked their tears, sometimes by his conversation, and sometimes with serious reproaches, asking them “where were their precepts of philosophy, and where the fortitude under trials which should have been learnt from the studies of many years? Did not every one know the cruelty of Nero? and what was left for him to do but to make an end of his master and tutor after the murder of his mother and his brother?” He then embraced his wife Paulina, and, with a slight faltering of his lofty sternness, begged and entreated her not to enter on an endless sorrow, but to endure the loss of her husband by the aid of those noble consolations which she must derive from the contemplation of his virtuous life. But Paulina declared that she would die with him, and Seneca, not opposing the deed which would win her such permanent glory, and at the same time unwilling to leave her to future wrongs, yielded to her wish. The veins of their arms were opened by the same blow; but the blood of Seneca, impoverished by old age and temperate living, flowed so slowly that it was necessary also to open the veins of his legs. This mode of death, chosen by the Romans as comparatively painless, is in fact under certain circumstances most agonizing. Worn out by these cruel tortures, and unwilling to weaken his wife’s fortitude by so dreadful a spectacle, glad at the same time to spare himself the sight of _her_ sufferings, he persuaded her to go to another room. Even then his eloquence did not fail. It is told of Andre Chenier, the French poet, that on his way to execution he asked for writing materials to record some of the strange thoughts which filled his mind. The wish was denied him, but Seneca had ample liberty to record his last utterances. Amanuenses were summoned, who took down those dying admonitions, and in the time of Tacitus they still were extant. To us, however, this interesting memorial of a Pagan deathbed is irrevocably lost.
Nero, meanwhile, to whom the news of these circumstances was taken, having no dislike to Paulina, and unwilling to incur the odium of too much bloodshed, ordered her death to be prohibited and her wounds to be bound. She was already unconscious, but her slaves and freedmen succeeded in saving her life. She lived a few years longer, cherishing her husband’s memory, and bearing in the attenuation of her frame, and the ghastly pallor of her countenance, the lasting proofs of that deep affection which had characterised their married life.
Seneca was not yet dead, and, to shorten these protracted and useless sufferings, he begged his friend and physician Statius Annaeus to give him a draught of hemlock, the same poison by which the great philosopher of Athens had been put to death. But his limbs were already cold, and the draught proved fruitless. He then entered a bath of hot water, sprinkling the slaves who stood nearest to him, with the words that he was pouring a libation to Jupiter the Liberator.[36] Even the warm water failed to make the blood flow more speedily, and he was finally carried into one of those vapour baths which the Romans called _sudatoria_, and stifled with its steam. His body was burned privately, without any of the usual ceremonies. Such had been his own wish, expressed, not after the fall of his fortunes, but at a time when his thoughts had been directed to his latter end, in the zenith of his great wealth and conspicuous power.
[Footnote 36: Sicco Polentone, an Italian, who wrote a Life of Seneca (d. 1461), makes Seneca a secret Christian, and represents this as an invocation of Christ, and says that he baptized himself with the water of the bath!]
So died a Pagan philosopher, whose life must always excite our interest and pity, although we cannot apply to him the titles of great or good. He was a man of high genius, of great susceptibility, of an ardent and generous temperament, of far-sighted and sincere humanity. Some of his sentiments are so remarkable for their moral beauty and profundity that they forcibly remind us of the expressions of St. Paul. But Seneca fell infinitely short of his own high standard, and has contemptuously been called “the father of all them that wear shovel hats.” Inconsistency is written on the entire history of his life, and it has earned him the scathing contempt with which many writers have treated his memory. “The business of a philosopher,” says Lord Macaulay, in his most scornful strain, “was to declaim in praise of poverty, with two millions sterling out at usury; to meditate epigrammatic conceits about the evils of luxury in gardens which moved the envy of sovereigns; to rant about liberty while fawning on the insolent and pampered freedmen of a tyrant; to celebrate the divine beauty of virtue with the same pen which had just before written a defence of the murder of a mother by a son.” “Seneca,” says Niebuhr, “was an accomplished man of the world, who occupied himself very much with virtue, and may have considered himself to be an ancient Stoic. He certainly believed that he was a most ingenious and virtuous philosopher; but he acted on the principle that, as far as he himself was concerned, he could dispense with the laws of morality which he laid down for others, and that he might give way to his natural propensities.”
In Seneca’s life, then, we see as clearly as in those of many professing Christians that it is impossible to be at once worldly and righteous. Seneca’s utter failure was due to the vain attempt to combine in his own person two opposite characters–that of a Stoic and that of a courtier. Had he been a true philosopher, or a mere courtier, he would have been happier, and even more respected. To be both was absurd: hence, even in his writings, he was driven into inconsistency. He is often compelled to abandon the lofty utterances of Stoicism, and to charge philosophers with ignorance of life. In his treatise on a Happy Life he is obliged to introduce a sort of indirect autobiographical apology for his wealth and position.[37] In spite of his lofty pretensions to simplicity, in spite of that sort of amateur asceticism which, in common with other wealthy Romans, he occasionally practised, in spite of his final offer to abandon his entire patrimony to the Emperor, we fear that he cannot be acquitted of an almost insatiable avarice. We need not indeed believe the fierce calumnies which charged him with exhausting Italy by a boundless usury, and even stirring up a war in Britain by the severity of his exactions; but it is quite clear that he deserved the title of _Proedives_, “the over-wealthy,” by which he has been so pointedly signalized. It is strange that the most splendid intellects should so often have sunk under the slavery of this meanest vice. In the Bible we read how the “rewards of divination” seduced from his allegiance to God the splendid enchanter of Mesopotamia:
“In outline dim and vast
Their fearful shadows cast
The giant form of Empires on their way To ruin:–one by one
They tower and they are gone,
Yet in the prophet’s soul the dreams of avarice stay.
“No sun or star so bright,
In all the world of light,
That they should draw to heaven his downward eye: He hears the Almighty’s word,
He sees the angel’s sword,
Yet low upon the earth his heart and treasure lie.”
[Footnote 37: See _Ad. Polyb_. 37: _Ep_. 75; _De Vit. Beat_. 17, 18, 22.]
And in Seneca we see some of the most glowing pictures of the nobility of poverty combined with the most questionable avidity in the pursuit of wealth. Yet how completely did he sell himself for naught. It is the lesson which we see in every conspicuously erring life, and it was illustrated less than three years afterwards in the terrible fate of the tyrant who had driven him to death. For a short period of his life, indeed, Seneca was at the summit of power; yet, courtier as he was, he incurred the hatred, the suspicion, and the punishment of all the three Emperors during whose reigns his manhood was passed. “Of all unsuccessful men,” says Mr. Froude, “in every shape, whether divine or human, or devilish, there is none equal to Bunyan’s Mr. Facing-both-ways–the fellow with one eye on heaven and one on earth–who sincerely preaches one thing and sincerely does another, and from the intensity of his unreality is unable either to see or feel the contradiction. He is substantially trying to cheat both God and the devil, and is in reality only cheating himself and his neighbours. This of all characters upon the earth appears to us to be the one of which there is no hope at all, a character becoming in these days alarmingly abundant; and the aboundance of which makes us find even in a Reineke an inexpressible relief.” And, in point of fact, the inconsistency of Seneca’s life was a _conscious_ inconsistency. “To the student,” he says, “who professes his wish to rise to a loftier grade of virtue, I would answer that this is my _wish_ also, but I dare not hope it. _I am preoccupied with vices. All I require of myself is, not to be equal to the best_, but only _to be better than the bad_.” No doubt Seneca meant this to be understood merely for modest depreciation; but it was far