Wanderings in Corsica: Its History and Its Heroes. Vol. 1 of 2

The Tower of Seneca can be seen at sea, and from a distance of many miles. It stands on a gigantic, quite naked mass of granite, which rises isolated from the mountain-ridge, and bears on its summit the black weather-beaten pile. The ruin consists of a single round tower—lonely and melancholy it stands there, hung with hovering mists, all around bleak heath-covered hills, the sea on both sides deep below.

If, as imaginative tradition affirms, the banished stoic spent eight years of exile here, throning among the clouds, in the silent rocky wilds—then he had found a place not ill adapted for a philosopher disposed to make wise reflections on the world and fate; and to contemplate with wonder and reverence the workings of the eternal elements of nature. The genius of Solitude is the wise man's best instructor; in still night hours he may have given Seneca insight into the world's transitoriness, and shown him the vanity of great Rome, when the exile was inclined to bewail his lot. After Seneca returned from his banishment to Rome, he sometimes, perhaps, among the abominations of the court of Nero, longed for the solitary days of Corsica. There is an old Roman tragedy called Octavia, the subject of which is the tragic fate of Nero's first empress.[H] In this tragedy Seneca appears as the moralizing figure, and on one occasion delivers himself as follows:—

A rude sheep-track led us up the mountain over shattered rocks. Half-way up to the tower, completely hidden among crags and bushes, lies a forsaken Franciscan cloister. The shepherds and the wild fig-tree now dwell in its halls, and the raven croaks the de profundis. But the morning and the evening still come there to hold their silent devotions, and kindle incense of myrtle, mint, and cytisus. What a fragrant breath of herbs is about us! what morning stillness on the mountains and the sea!

We stood on the Tower of Seneca. We had clambered on hands and feet to reach its walls. By holding fast to projecting ledges and hanging perilously over the abyss, you can gain a window. There is no other entrance into the tower; its outer works are destroyed, but the remains show that a castle, either of the seigniors of Cape Corso or of the Genoese, stood here. The tower is built of astonishingly firm material; its battlements, however, are rent and dilapidated. It is unlikely that Seneca lived on this Aornos, this height forsaken by the very birds, and certainly too lofty a flight for moral philosophers—a race that love the levels. Seneca probably lived in one of the Roman colonies, Aleria or Mariana, where the stoic, accustomed to the conveniences of Roman city life, may have established himself comfortably in some house near the sea; so that the favourite mullet and tunny had not far to travel from the strand to his table.

A picture from the fearfully beautiful world of imperial Rome passed before me as I sat on Seneca's tower. Who can say he rightly and altogether comprehends this world? It often seems to me as if it were Hades, and as if the whole human race of the period were holding in its obscure twilight a great diabolic carnival of fools, dancing a gigantic, universal ballet before the Emperor's throne, while the Emperor sits there gloomy as Pluto, only breaking out now and then into insane laughter; for it is the maddest carnival this; old Seneca plays in it too, among the Pulcinellos, and appears in character with his bathing-tub.

Even a Seneca may have something tragi-comic about him, if we think of him, for example, in the pitiably ludicrous shape in which he is represented in the old statue that bears his name. He stands there naked, a cloth about his loins, in the bath in which he means to die, a sight heart-rending to behold, with his meagre form so tremulous about the knees, and his face so unutterably wo-begone. He resembles one of the old pictures of St. Jerome, or some starveling devotee attenuated by penance; he is tragi-comic, provocative of laughter no less than pity, as many of the representations of the old martyrs are, the form of their suffering being usually so whimsical.

Seneca was born, B.C. 3, at Cordova, in Spain, of equestrian family. His mother, Helvia, was a woman of unusual ability; his father, Lucius Annæus, a rhetorician of note, who removed with his family to Rome. In the time of Caligula, Seneca the younger distinguished himself as an orator, and Stoic philosopher of extraordinary learning. A remarkably good memory had been of service to him. He himself relates that after hearing two thousand names once repeated, he could repeat them again in the same order, and that he had no difficulty in doing the same with two hundred verses.

In favour at the court of Claudius, he owed his fall to Messalina. She accused him of an intrigue with the notorious Julia, the daughter of Germanicus, and the most profligate woman in Rome. The imputation is doubly comical, as coming from a Messalina, and because it makes us think of Seneca the moralist as a Don Juan. It is hard to say how much truth there is in the scandalous story, but Rome was a strange place, and nothing can be more bizarre than some of the characters it produced. Julia was got out of the way, and Don Juan Seneca sent into banishment among the barbarians of Corsica. The philosopher now therefore became, without straining the word, a Corsican bandit.

There was in those days no more terrible punishment than that of exile, because expulsion from Rome was banishment from the world. Eight long years Seneca lived on the wild island. I cannot forgive my old friend, therefore, for recording nothing about its nature, about the history and condition of its inhabitants, at that period. A single chapter from the pen of Seneca on these subjects, would now be of great value to us. But to have said nothing about the barbarous country of his exile, was very consistent with his character as Roman. Haughty, limited, void of sympathetic feeling for his kind, was the man of those times. How different is the relation in which we now stand to nature and history!

For the banished Seneca the island was merely a prison that he detested. The little that he says about it in his book De Consolatione ad Matrem Helviam, shows how little he knew of it. For though it was no doubt still more rude and uncultivated than at present, its natural grandeur was the same. He composed the following epigrams on Corsica, which are to be found in his poetical works:—

The second has been said to be spurious, but I do not see why our heart-broken exile should not have been its author, as well as any of his contemporaries or successors in Corsican banishment.

The Corsicans have not failed to take revenge on Seneca. Since he gives them and their country such a disgraceful character, they have connected a scandalous story with his name. Popular tradition has preserved only a single incident from the period of his residence in Corsica, and it is as follows:—As Seneca sat in his tower and looked down into the frightful island, he saw the Corsican virgins, that they were fair. Thereupon the philosopher descended, and he dallied with the daughters of the land. One comely shepherdess did he honour with his embrace; but the kinsfolk of the maiden came upon him suddenly, and took him, and scourged the philosopher with nettles.

Ever since, the nettle grows profusely and ineradicably round the Tower of Seneca, as a warning to moral philosophers. The Corsicans call it Ortica de Seneca.

Unhappy Seneca! He is always getting into tragi-comic situations. A Corsican said to me: "You have read what Seneca says of us? ma era un birbone—but he was a great rascal." Seneca morale, says Dante,—Seneca birbone, says the Corsican—another instance of his love for his country.

Other sighs of exile did the unfortunate philosopher breathe out in verse—some epigrams to his friends, one on his native city of Cordova. If Seneca wrote any of the tragedies which bear his name in Corsica, it must certainly have been the Medea. Where could he have found a locality more likely to have inspired him to write on a subject connected with the Argonauts, than this sea-girt island? Here he might well make his chorus sing those remarkable verses which predict Columbus:—

Now the great navigator Columbus was born in the Genoese territory, not far from Corsica. The Corsicans will have it that he was born in Calvi, in Corsica itself, and they maintain this till the present day.

CHAPTER V.

SENECA MORALE.

Fair fruits grew for Seneca in his exile; and perhaps he owed some of his exalted philosophy rather to his Corsican solitude than to the teachings of an Attalus or a Socio. In the Letter of Consolation to his mother, he writes thus at the close:—You must believe me happy and cheerful, as when in prosperity. That is true prosperity when the mind devotes itself to its pursuits without disturbing thoughts, and, now pleasing itself with lighter studies, now thirsting after truth, elevates itself to the contemplation of its own nature and of that of the universe. First, it investigates the countries and their situations, then the nature of the circumfluent sea, and its changes of ebb and flow; then it contemplates the terrible powers that lie between heaven and earth—the thunder, lightnings, winds, rain, snow and hail, that disquiet this space; at last, when it has wandered through the lower regions, it takes its flight to the highest, and enjoys the beautiful spectacle of celestial things, and, mindful of its own eternity, enters into all which has been and shall be to all eternity.

When I took up Seneca's Letter of Consolation to his mother, I was not a little curious to see how he would console her. How would one of the thousand cultivated exiles scattered over the world at the present time console his mother? Seneca's letter is a quite methodically arranged treatise, consisting of seventeen chapters. It is a more than usually instructive contribution to the psychology of these old Stoics. The son is not so particularly anxious to console his mother as to write an excellent and elegant treatise, the logic and style of which shall procure him admiration. He is quite proud that his treatise will be a species of composition hitherto unknown in the world of letters. The vain man writes to his mother like an author to a critic with whom he is coolly discussing the pros and cons of his subject. I have, says he, consulted all the works of the great geniuses who have written upon the methods of moderating grief, but I have found no example of any one's consoling his friends when it was himself they were lamenting. In this new case, therefore, in which I found myself, I was embarrassed, and feared lest I might open the wounds instead of healing them. Must not a man who raises his head from the funeral-pile itself to comfort his relatives, need new words, such as the common language of daily life does not supply him with? Every great and unusual sorrow must make its own selection of words, if it does not refuse itself language altogether. I shall venture to write to you, therefore, not in confidence on my talent, but because I myself, the consoler, am here to serve as the most effectual consolation. For your son's sake, to whom you can deny nothing, you will not, as I trust (though all grief is stubborn), refuse to permit bounds to be set to your grief.

He now begins to console after his new fashion, reckoning up to his mother all that she has already suffered, and drawing the conclusion that she must by this time have become callous. Throughout the whole treatise you hear the skeleton of the arrangement rattling. Firstly, his mother is not to grieve on his account; secondly, his mother is not to grieve on her own account. The letter is full of the most beautiful stoical contempt of the world.

"Yet it is a terrible thing to be deprived of one's country." What is to be said to this?—Mother, consider the vast multitude of people in Rome; the greater number of them have congregated there from all parts of the world. One is driven from home by ambition, another by business of state, by an embassy, by the quest of luxury, by vice, by the wish to study, by the desire of seeing the spectacles, by friendship, by speculation, by eloquence, by beauty. Then, leaving Rome out of view, which indeed is to be considered the mother-city of them all, go to other cities, go to islands, come here to Corsica—everywhere are more strangers than natives. "For to man is given a desire of movement and of change, because he is moved by the celestial Spirit; consider the heavenly luminaries that give light to the world—none of them remains fixed—they wander ceaselessly on their path, and change perpetually their place." His poetic vein gave Seneca this fine thought. Our well-known wanderer's song has the words—

"Varro, the most learned of the Romans," continues Seneca, "considers it the best compensation for the change of dwelling-place, that the nature of things is everywhere the same. Marcus Brutus finds sufficient consolation in the fact that he who goes into exile can take all that he has of truly good with him. Is not what we lose a mere trifle? Wherever we turn, two glorious things go with us—Nature that is everywhere, and Virtue that is our own. Let us travel through all possible countries, and we shall find no part of the earth which man cannot make his home. Everywhere the eye can rise to heaven, and all the divine worlds are at an equal distance from all the earthly. So long, therefore, as my eyes are not debarred that spectacle, with seeing which they are never satisfied; so long as I can behold moon and sun; so long as my gaze can rest on the other celestial luminaries; so long as I can inquire into their rising and setting, their courses, and the causes of their moving faster or slower; so long as I can contemplate the countless stars of night, and mark how some are immoveable—how others, not hastening through large spaces, circle in their own path, how many beam forth with a sudden brightness, many blind the eye with a stream of fire as if they fell, others pass along the sky in a long train of light; so long as I am with these, and dwell, as much as it is allowed to mortals, in heaven; so long as I can maintain my soul, which strives after the contemplation of natures related to it, in the pure ether, of what importance to me is the soil on which my foot treads? This island bears no fruitful nor pleasant trees; it is not watered by broad and navigable streams; it produces nothing that other nations can desire; it is hardly fertile enough to supply the necessities of the inhabitants; no precious stone is here hewn (non pretiosus lapis hic cæditur); no veins of gold or silver are here brought to light; but the soul is narrow that delights itself with what is earthly. It must be guided to that which is everywhere the same, and nowhere loses its splendour."

Had I Humboldt's Cosmos at hand, I should look whether the great natural philosopher has taken notice of these lofty periods of Seneca, where he treats of the sense of the ancients for natural beauty.

This, too, is a spirited passage:—"The longer they build their colonnades, the higher they raise their towers, the broader they stretch their streets, the deeper they dig their summer grottos, the more massively they pile their banqueting-halls—all the more effectually they cover themselves from the sky.—Brutus relates in his book on virtue, that he saw Marcellus in exile in Mitylene, and that he lived, as far as it was possible for human nature, in the enjoyment of the greatest happiness, and never was more devoted to literature than then. Hence, adds he, as he was to return without him, it seemed to him that he was rather himself going into exile than leaving the other in banishment behind him."

Now follows a panegyric on poverty and moderation, as contrasted with the luxurious gluttony of the rich, who ransack heaven and earth to tickle their palates, bring game from Phasis, and fowls from Parthia, who vomit in order to eat, and eat in order to vomit. "The Emperor Caligula," says Seneca, "whom Nature seems to me to have produced to show what the most degrading vice could do in the highest station, ate a dinner one day, that cost ten million sesterces; and although I have had the aid of the most ingenious men, still I have hardly been able to make out how the tribute of three provinces could be transformed into a single meal." Like Rousseau, Seneca preaches the return of men to the state of nature. The times of the two moralists were alike; they themselves resemble each other in weakness of character, though Seneca, as compared with Rousseau, was a Roman and a hero.

Scipio's daughters received their dowries from the public treasury, because their father left nothing behind him. "O happy husbands of such maidens," cries Seneca; "husbands to whom the Roman people was father-in-law! Are they to be held happier whose ballet-dancers bring with them a million sesterces as dowry?"

After Seneca has comforted his mother in regard to his own sufferings, he proceeds to comfort her with reference to herself. "You must not imitate the example," he writes to her, "of women whose grief, when it had once mastered them, ended only with death. You know many, who, after the loss of their sons, never more laid off the robe of mourning that they had put on. But your nature has ever been stronger than this, and imposes upon you a nobler course. The excuse of the weakness of the sex cannot avail for her who is far removed from all female frailties. The most prevailing evil of the present time—unchastity, has not ranked you with the common crowd; neither precious stones nor pearls have had power over you, and wealth, accounted the highest of human blessings, has not dazzled you. The example of the bad, which is dangerous even to the virtuous, has not contaminated you—the strictly educated daughter of an ancient and severe house. You were never ashamed of the number of your children, as if they made you old before your time; you never—like some whose beautiful form is their only recommendation—concealed your fruitfulness, as if the burden were unseemly; nor did you ever destroy the hope of children that had been conceived in your bosom. You never disfigured your face with spangles or with paint; and never did a garment please you, that had been made only to show nakedness. Modesty appeared to you the alone ornament—the highest and never-fading beauty!" So writes the son to his mother, and it seems to me there is a most philosophical want of affectation in his style.

He alludes to Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi; but he does not conceal from himself that grief is a disobedient thing. Traitorous tears, he knows, will appear on the face of assumed serenity. "Sometimes," says Seneca, "we entangle the soul in games and gladiator-shows; but even in the midst of such spectacles, the remembrance of its loss steals softly upon it. Therefore is it better to overcome than to deceive. For when the heart has either been cheated by pleasure, or diverted by business, it rebels again, and derives from repose itself the force for new disquiet; but it is lastingly still if it has yielded to reason." A wise man's voice enunciates here simply and beautifully the alone right, but the bitterly difficult rules for the art of life. Seneca, accordingly, counsels his mother not to use the ordinary means for overcoming her grief—a picturesque tour, or employment in household affairs; he advises mental occupation, lamenting, at the same time, that his father—an excellent man, but too much attached to the customs of the ancients—never could prevail upon himself to give her philosophical cultivation. Here we have an amusing glimpse of the old Seneca, I mean of the father. We know now how he looked. When the fashionable literary ladies and gentlemen in Cordova, who had picked up ideas about the rights of woman, and the elevation of her social position, from the Republic of Plato, represented to the old gentleman, that it were well if his young wife attended the lectures of some philosophers, he growled out: "Absurd nonsense; my wife shall not have her head turned with your high-flying notions, nor be one of your silly blue-stockings; cook shall she, bear children, and bring up children!" So said the worthy gentleman, and added, in excellent Spanish, "Basta!"

Seneca now speaks at considerable length of the magnanimity of which woman is capable, having no idea then that he was yet, when dying, to experience the truth of what he said, in the case of his own wife, Paulina. A noble man, therefore, a stoic of exalted virtue, has addressed this Letter of Consolation to Helvia. Is it possible that precisely the same man can think and write like a crawling parasite—like the basest flatterer?

CHAPTER VI.

SENECA BIRBONE.

Here is a second Letter of Consolation, which Seneca wrote in the second or third year of his Corsican exile, to Polybius, the freedman of Claudius, a courtier of the ordinary stamp. Polybius served the over-learned Claudius as literary adviser, and tormented himself with a Latin translation of Homer and a Greek one of Virgil. The loss of his talented brother occasioned Seneca's consolatory epistle to the courtier. He wrote the treatise with the full consciousness that Polybius would read it to the Emperor, and, not to miss the opportunity of appeasing the wrath of Claudius, he made it a model of low flattery of princes and their influential favourites. When we read it, we must not forget what sort of men Claudius and Polybius were.

"O destiny," cries the flatterer, "how cunningly hast thou sought out the vulnerable spot! What was there to rob such a man of? Money? He has always despised it. Life? His genius makes him immortal. He has himself provided that his better part shall endure, for his glorious rhetorical works cannot fail to rescue him from the ordinary lot of mortals. So long as literature is held in honour, so long as the Latin language retains its vigour, or the Greek its grace, so long shall he live with the greatest men, whose genius his own equals, or, if his modesty would object to that, at least approaches.—Unworthy outrage! Polybius mourns, Polybius has an affliction, and the Emperor is gracious to him! By this, inexorable destiny, thou wouldst, without doubt, show that none can be shielded from thee, no, not even by the Emperor! Yet, why does Polybius weep? Has he not his beloved Emperor, who is dearer to him than life? So long as it is well with him, then is it well with all who are yours, then have you lost nothing, then must your eyes be not only dry, but bright with joy. The Emperor is everything to you, in him you have all that you can desire. To him, your divinity, you must therefore raise your glance, and grief will have no power over your soul.

"Destiny, withhold thy hand from the Emperor, and show thy power only in blessing, letting him remain as a physician to mankind, who have suffered now so long, that he may again order and adjust what the madness of his predecessor destroyed. May this star, which has arisen in its brightness on a world plunged into abysses of darkness, shine evermore! May he subdue Germany, open up Britain, and celebrate ancestral victories and new triumphs, of which his clemency, which takes the first place among his virtues, makes me hope that I too shall be a witness. For he did not so cast me down, that he shall not again raise me up: no, it was not even he who overthrew me; but when destiny gave me the thrust, and I was falling, he broke my fall, and, gently intervening with godlike hand, bore me to a place of safety. He raised his voice for me in the senate, and not only gave me, but petitioned for, my life. He will himself see how he has to judge my cause; either his justice will recognise it as good, or his clemency will make it so. The benefit will still be the same, whether he perceives, or whether he wills, that I am innocent. Meanwhile, it is a great consolation to me, in my wretchedness, to see how his compassion travels through the whole world; and as he has again brought back to the light, from this corner in which I am buried, many who lay sunk in the oblivion of a long banishment, I do not fear that he will forget me. But he himself knows best the time for helping each. Nothing shall be wanting on my part that he may not blush to come at length to me. All hail to thy clemency, Cæsar! thanks to which, exiles live more peacefully under thee than the noblest of the people under Caius. They do not tremble, they do not hourly expect the sword, they do not shudder to see a ship coming. Through thee they have at once a goal to their cruel fate, and the hope of a better future, and a peaceful present. Surely the thunderbolts are altogether righteous which even those worship whom they strike."

O nettles, more nettles, noble Corsicans,—era un birbone!

The epistle concludes in these terms: "I have written this to you as well as I could, with a mind grown languid and dull through long inactivity; if it appears to you not worthy of your genius, or to supply medicine too slight for your sorrow, consider that the Latin word flows but reluctantly to his pen, in whose ear the barbarians have long been dinning their confused and clumsy jargon."

His flattery did not avail the sorrow-laden exile, but changes in the Roman court ended his banishment. The head of Polybius had fallen. Messalina had been executed. So stupid was Claudius, that he forgot the execution of his wife, and some days after asked at supper why Messalina did not come to table. Thus, all these horrors are dashed with the tragi-comic. The best of comforters, the Corsican bandit, returns. Agrippina, the new empress of Claudius, wishes him to educate her son Nero, now eleven years old. Can there be anything more tragi-comic than Seneca as tutor to Nero? He came, thanking the gods that they had laid upon him such a task as that of educating a boy to be Emperor of the world. He expected now to fill the whole earth with his own philosophy by infusing it into the young Nero. What an undertaking—at once tragical and ridiculous—to bring up a young tiger-cub on the principles of the Stoics! For the rest, Seneca found in his hopeful pupil the materials of the future man totally unspoiled by bungling scholastic methods; for he had grown up in a most divine ignorance, and, till his twelfth year, had enjoyed the tender friendship of a barber, a coachman, and a rope-dancer. From such hands did Seneca receive the boy who was destined to rule over gods and men.

As Seneca was banished to Corsica in the first year of the reign of Claudius, and returned in the eighth, he was privileged to enjoy this "divinity and celestial star" for more than five years. One day, however, Claudius died, for Agrippina gave him poison in a pumpkin which served as drinking-cup. The notorious Locusta had mixed the potion. The death of Claudius furnished Seneca with the ardently longed for opportunity of venting his revenge. Terribly did the philosopher make the Emperor's memory suffer for that eight years' banishment; he wrote on the dead man the satire, called the Apokolokyntosis—a pasquil of astonishing wit and almost incredible coarseness, equalling the writings of Lucian in sparkle and cleverness. The title is happy. The word, invented for the nonce, parodies the notion of the apotheosis of the Emperors, or their reception among the gods; and would be literally translated Pumpkinification, or reception of Claudius among the pumpkins. This satire should be read. It is highly characteristic of the period of Roman history in which it was written—a period when an utterly limitless despotism nevertheless allowed of a man's using such daring freedom of speech, and when an Emperor just dead could be publicly ridiculed by his successor, his own family, and the people, as a jack-pudding, without compromising the imperial dignity. In this Roman world, all is ironic accident, fools' carnival, tragi-comic, and bizarre.

Seneca speaks with all the freedom of a mask and as Roman Pasquino, and thus commences—"What happened on the 13th of October, in the consulship of Asinius Marcellus and Acilius Aviola, in the first year of the new Emperor, at the beginning of the period of blessing from heaven, I shall now deliver to memory. And in what I have to say, neither my vengeance nor my gratitude shall speak a word. If any one asks me where I got such accurate information about everything, I shall in the meantime not answer, if I don't choose. Who shall compel me? Do I not know that I have become a free man, since a certain person took his leave, who verified the proverb—One must either be born a king or a fool? And if I choose to answer, I shall say the first thing that comes into my head." Seneca now affirms, sneeringly, that he heard what he is about to relate from the senator who saw Drusilla [sister and mistress of Caligula] ascend to heaven from the Appian Way.[L] The same man had now, according to the philosopher, been a witness of all that had happened to Claudius on occasion of his ascension.

I shall be better understood, continued Seneca, if I say it was on the 13th of October; the hour I am unable exactly to fix, for there is still greater variance between the clocks than between the philosophers. It was, however, between the sixth and the seventh hour—Claudius was just gasping for a little breath, and couldn't find any. Hereupon Mercury, who had always been delighted with the genius of the man, took one of the three Parcæ aside, and said—"Cruel woman, why do you let the poor mortal torment himself so long, since he has not deserved it? He has been gasping for breath for sixty-four years now. What ails you at him? Allow the mathematicians to be right at last, who, ever since he became Emperor, have been assuring us of his death every year, nay, every month. And yet it is no wonder if they make mistakes. Nobody knows the man's hour—for nobody has ever looked on him as born. Do your duty,

Atropos now cuts Claudius's thread of life; but Lachesis spins another—a glittering thread, that of Nero; while Phœbus plays upon his lyre. In well-turned, unprincipled verses, Seneca flatters his young pupil, his new sun—

Claudius meanwhile pumped out the air-bubble of his soul, and thereafter, as a phantasma, ceased to be visible. "He expired while he was listening to the comedians; so that, you perceive, I have good reason for dreading these people." His last words were—"Vae me, puto concavi me."

Claudius is dead, then. It is announced to Jupiter, that a tall personage, rather gray, has arrived; that he threatens nobody knows what, shakes his head perpetually, and limps with his right leg; that the language he speaks is unintelligible, being neither that of the Greeks nor that of the Romans, nor the tongue of any known race. Jupiter now orders Hercules, since he has vagabondized through all the nations of the world, and is likely to know, to see what kind of mortal this may be. When Hercules, who had seen too many monsters to be easily frightened, set eyes on this portentous face, and strange gait, and heard a voice, not like the voice of any terrestial creature, but like some sea-monster's—hoarse, bellowing, confused, he was at first somewhat discomposed, and thought that a thirteenth labour had arrived for him. On closer examination, however, he thought the portent had some resemblance to a man. He therefore asked, in Homer's Greek—

Claudius was mightily rejoiced to meet with philologers in heaven, and hoped he might find occasion of referring to his own histories. [He had written twenty books of Tyrrhenian, and eight of Carthaginian history, in Greek.] He immediately answers from Homer also, sillily quoting the line—

Fever, who alone of all the Roman gods has accompanied Claudius to heaven, gives him the lie, and affirms him to be a Gaul. "And therefore, since as Gaul he could not omit it, he took Rome." [While I write down this sentence of the old Roman's here in Rome, and hear at the same moment Gallic trumpets blowing, its correctness becomes very plain to me.] Claudius immediately gives orders to cut off Fever's head. He prevails on Hercules to bring him into the assembly of the gods. But the god Janus proposes, that from this time forward none of those who "eat the fruits of the field" shall be deified; and Augustus reads his opinion from a written paper, recommending that Claudius should be made to quit Olympus within three days. The gods assent, and Mercury hereupon drags off the Emperor to the infernal regions. On the Via Sacra they fall in with the funeral procession of Claudius, which is thus described: "It was a magnificent funeral, and such expense had been lavished on it, that you could very well see a god was being buried. There were flute-players, horn-blowers, and such crowds of players on brazen instruments, and such a din, that even Claudius could hear it. Everybody was merry and pleased; the Populus Romanus was walking about as if it were a free people. Agatho only, and a few pleaders, wept, and that evidently with all their heart. The jurisconsults were emerging from their obscure retreats—pale, emaciated, gasping for breath, like persons newly recalled to life. One of these noticing how the pleaders laid their heads together and bewailed their misfortunes, came up to them and said: 'I told you your Saturnalia would not last always!'" When Claudius saw his own funeral, he perceived that he was dead; for, with great sound and fury, they were singing the anapæstic nænia:—

When Claudius arrives in the nether regions, a choir of singers hasten towards him, crying: "He is found!—joy! joy!" [This was the cry of the Egyptians when they found the ox Apis.] He is now surrounded by those whom he had caused to be put to death, Polybius and his other freedmen appearing among the rest. Æacus, as judge, examines into the actions of his life, and finds that he has murdered thirty senators, three hundred and fifteen knights, and citizens as the sands of the sea. He thereupon pronounces sentence on Claudius, and dooms him to cast dice eternally from a box with holes in it. Suddenly Caligula appears, and claims him as his slave. He produces witnesses, who prove that he had frequently beat, boxed, and horsewhipped his uncle Claudius; and as nobody seems able to dispute this, Claudius is handed over to Caligula. Caligula presents him to his freedman Menander, whom he is now to help in drawing out law-papers.

Such is a sketch of this remarkable "Apokolokyntosis of Claudius." Seneca, who had basely flattered the Emperor while alive, was also mean enough to drag him through the mire after he was dead. A noble soul does not take revenge on the corpse of its foe, even though that foe may have been but the parody of a man, and as detestable as he was ridiculous. The insults of the coward alone are here in place. The Apokolokyntosis faithfully reflects the degenerate baseness of Imperial Rome.

CHAPTER VII.

SENECA EROE.

Pasquino Seneca now transforms himself in a twinkling into the dignified moralist; he writes his treatise "Concerning Clemency, to the Emperor Nero"—a pleasantly contradictory title, Nero and clemency. It is well enough known, however, that the young Emperor, like all his predecessors, governed without cruelty during the first years of his reign. This work of Seneca's is of high merit, wise, and full of noble sentiment.

Nero loaded his teacher with riches; and the author of the panegyric on poverty possessed a princely fortune, gardens, lands, palaces, villas outside the Porta Nomentana, in Baiæ, on the Alban Mount, upwards of six millions in value. He lent money at usurious rates of interest in Italy and in the provinces, greedily scraped and hoarded, fawned like a hound upon Agrippina and her son—till times changed with him.

In four years Nero had thrown off every restraint. The murder of his mother had met with no resistance from the timid Seneca. The high-minded Tacitus makes reproachful allusion to him. At length Nero began to find the philosopher inconvenient. He had already put his prefect Burrhus to death, and Seneca had hastened to put all his wealth at the disposal of the furious monarch; he now lived in complete retirement. But his enemies accused him of being privy to the conspiracy of Calpurnius Piso; and his nephew, the well-known poet Lucan, was, not without ground, affirmed to be similarly implicated. The conduct of Lucan in the matter was incredibly base. He made a pusillanimous confession; condescended to the most unmanly entreaties; and, sheltering himself behind the illustrious example set by Nero in his matricide, he denounced his innocent mother as a participant in the conspiracy. This abominable proceeding did not save him; he was condemned to voluntary death, went home, wrote to his father Annæus Mela Seneca about some emendations of his poems, dined luxuriously, and with the greatest equanimity opened his veins. So self-contradictory are these Roman characters.

Seneca is noble, great, and dignified in his end; he dies with an almost Socratic cheerfulness, with a tranquillity worthy of Cato. He chose bleeding as the means of his death, and consented that his heroic wife Paulina should die in the same way. The two were at that time in a country-house four miles from Rome. Nero kept restlessly despatching tribunes to the villa to see how matters were going on. Word was brought him in haste that Paulina, too, had had her veins opened. Nero instantly sent off an order to prevent her death. The slaves bind the lady's wounds, staunch the bleeding, and Paulina is rescued against her will. She lived some years longer. Meanwhile, the blood flowed from the aged Seneca but sparingly, and with an agonizing slowness. He asked Statius Annæus for poison, and took it, but without success; he then had himself put in a warm bath. He sprinkled the surrounding slaves with water, saying; "I make this libation to Zeus the Liberator." As he still could not die here, he was carried into a vapour bath, and there was suffocated. He was in his sixty-eighth year.

Reader, let us not be too hard on this philosopher, who, after all, was a man of his degenerate time, and whose nature is a combination of splendid talent, love of truth, and love of wisdom, with the most despicable weaknesses. His writings exercised great influence throughout the whole of the Middle Ages, and have purified many a soul from vicious passion, and guided it in nobler paths. Seneca, let us part friends.

CHAPTER VIII.

THOUGHTS OF A BRIDE.