Seekers after God Part 3

"The swarm that in the noontide beam were born?

Gone to salute the rising Morn.

Fair laughs the Morn, and soft the zephyr blows, While proudly riding o'er the azure realm, In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes; Youth on the prow and Pleasure at the helm; Regardless of the sweeping Whirlwind's sway, That, hushed in grim repose, expects his evening prey."

The last lines of this pa.s.sage would alone have been applicable to Caius Caesar. There was nothing fair or gay even about the beginning of his reign. From first to last it was a reign of fury and madness, and l.u.s.t and blood. There was an hereditary taint of insanity in this family, which was developed by their being placed on the dizzy pinnacle of imperial despotism, and which usually took the form of monstrous and abnormal crime. If we would seek a parallel for Caius Caesar, we must look for it in the history of Christian VII. of Denmark, and Paul of Russia. In all three we find the same ghastly pallor, the same sleeplessness which compelled them to rise, and pace their rooms at night, the same incessant suspicion; the same inordinate thirst for cruelty and torture. He took a very early opportunity to disembarra.s.s himself of his benefactors, Macro and Ennia, and of his rival, the young Tiberius. The rest of his reign was a series of brutal extravagances. We have lost the portion of those matchless Annals of Tacitus which contained the reign of Caius, but more than enough to revolt and horrify is preserved in the scattered notices of Seneca, and in the narratives of Suetonius in Latin and Dio Ca.s.sius in Greek.

His madness showed itself sometimes in gluttonous extravagance, as when he ordered a supper which cost more than 8,000_l_; sometimes in a _bizarre_ and disgraceful mode of dress, as when he appeared in public in women's stockings, embroidered with gold and pearls; sometimes in a personality and insolence of demeanor towards every rank and cla.s.s in Rome, which made him ask a senator to supper, and ply him with drunken toasts, on the very evening on which he had condemned his son to death; sometimes in sheer raving blasphemy, as when he expressed his furious indignation against Jupiter for presuming to thunder while he was supping, or looking at the pantomimes; but most of all in a ferocity which makes Seneca apply to him the name of "Bellua," or "wild monster,"

and say that he seems to have been produced "for the disgrace and destruction of the human race."

We will quote from the pages of Seneca but one single pa.s.sage to justify his remark "that he was most greedy for human blood, which he ordered to stream in his very presence with such eagerness as though he were going to drink it up with his lips." He says that in one day he scourged and tortured men of consular and quaestorial parentage, knights and senators, not by way of examination, but out of pure caprice and rage; he seriously meditated the butchery of the entire senate; he expressed a wish that the Roman people had but a single neck, that he might strike it off at one blow; he silenced the screams or reproaches of his victims sometimes by thrusting a sponge in their mouths, sometimes by having their mouths gagged with their own torn robes, sometimes by ordering their tongues to be cut out before they were thrown to the wild beasts.

On one occasion, rising from a banquet, he called for his slippers, which were kept by the slaves while the guests reclined on the purple couches, and so impatient was he for the sight of death, that, walking up and down his covered portico by lamplight with ladies and senators, he then and there ordered some of his wretched victims to be beheaded in his sight.

It is a singular proof of the unutterable dread and detestation inspired by some of these Caesars, that their mere countenance is said to have inspired anguish. Tacitus, in the life of his father-in-law Agricola, mentions the shuddering recollection of the red face of Domitian, as it looked on at the games. Seneca speaks in one place of wretches doomed to undergo stones, sword, fire, and _Caius_; in another he says that he had tortured the n.o.blest Romans with everything which could possibly cause the intensest agony,--with cords, plates, rack, fire, and, as though it were the worst torture of all, with his look! What that look was, we learn from Seneca himself, "His face was ghastly pale, with a look of insanity; his fierce, dull eyes were half-hidden under a wrinkled brow; his ill-shaped head was partly bald, partly covered with dyed-hair; his neck covered with bristles, his legs thin, and his feet mis-shapen." Woe to the nation that lies under the heel of a brutal despotism; treble woe to the nation that can tolerate a despot so brutal as this! Yet this was the nation in the midst of which Seneca lived, and this was the despot under whom his early manhood was spent.

"But what more oft in nations grown corrupt, And by their vices brought to servitude, Than to love bondage more than liberty, Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty?"

It was one of the peculiarities of Caius Caesar that he hated the very existence of any excellence. He used to bully and insult the G.o.ds themselves, frowning even at the statues of Apollo and Jupiter of the Capitol. He thought of abolishing Homer, and order the works of Livy and Virgil to be removed from all libraries, because he could not bear that they should be praised. He ordered Julius Graecinus to be put to death for no other reason than this, "That he was a better man than it was expedient for a tyrant that any one should be;" for, as Pliny tells us, the Caesars deliberately preferred that their people should be vicious than that they should be virtuous. It was hardly likely that such a man should view with equanimity the rising splendour of Seneca's reputation.

Hitherto, the young man, who was thirty-five years old at the accession of Caius, had not written any of his philosophic works, but in all probability he had published his early, and no longer extant, treatises on earthquakes, on superst.i.tions, and the books _On India_, and _On the Manners of Egypt_, which had been the fruit of his early travels. It is probable, too, that he had recited in public some of those tragedies which have come down to us under his name, and in the composition of which he was certainly concerned. All these works, and especially the applause won by the public reading of his poems, would have given him that high literary reputation which we know him to have earned. It was not, however, this reputation, but the brilliancy and eloquence of his orations at the bar which excited the jealous hatred of the Emperor.

Caius piqued himself on the possession of eloquence; and, strange to say, there are isolated expressions of his which seem to show that, in lucid intervals, he was by no means devoid of intellectual acuteness.

For instance, there is real humour and insight in the nicknames of "a golden sheep" which he gave to the rich and placid Sila.n.u.s, and of "Ulysses in petticoats," by which he designated his grandmother, the august Livia. The two epigrammetic criticisms which he pa.s.sed upon the style of Seneca are not wholly devoid of truth; he called his works _Commissiones meras_, or mere displays.[25] In this expression he hit off, happily enough, the somewhat theatrical, the slightly pedantic and pedagogic and professorial character of Seneca's diction, its rhetorical ornament and ant.i.theses, and its deficiency in stern masculine simplicity and strength. In another remark he showed himself a still more felicitous critic. He called Seneca's writings _Arenu sine Calce_, "sand without lime," or, as we might say, "a rope of sand." This epigram showed a real critical faculty. It exactly hits off Seneca's short and disjointed sentences, consisting as they often do of detached ant.i.theses. It accords with the amusing comparison of Malebranche, that Seneca's composition, with its perpetual and futile recurrences, calls up to him the image of a dancer who ends where he begins.

[Footnote 25: Suet. _Calig._ liii.]

But Caius did not confine himself to clever and malignant criticism. On one occasion, when Seneca was pleading in his presence, he was so jealous and displeased at the brilliancy and power of the orator that he marked him out for immediate execution. Had Seneca died at this period he would probably have been little known, and he might have left few traces of his existence beyond a few tragedies of uncertain authenticity, and possibly a pa.s.sing notice in the page of Dio or Tacitus. But destiny reserved him for a more splendid and more questionable career. One of Caius's favourites whispered to the Emperor that it was useless to extinguish a waning lamp; that the health of the orator was so feeble that a natural death by the progress of his consumptive tendencies would, in a very short time, remove him out of the tyrant's way.

Throughout the remainder of the few years during which the reign of Caius continued, Seneca, warned in time, withdrew himself into complete obscurity, employing his enforced leisure in that unbroken industry which stored his mind with such encyclopaedic wealth. "None of my days,"

he says, in describing at a later period the way in which he spent his time, "is pa.s.sed in complete ease. I claim even a part of the night for my studies. I do not _find leisure_ for sleep, but I _succ.u.mb_ to it, and I keep my eyes at their work even when they are wearied and drooping with watchfulness. I have retired, not only from men, but from affairs, and especially from my own. I am doing the work for posterity; I am writing out things which may prove of advantage to them. I am intrusting to writing healthful admonitions--compositions, as it were, of useful medicines."

But the days of Caius drew rapidly to an end. His gross and unheard-of insults to Valerius Asiaticus and Ca.s.sius Chaereas brought on him condign vengeance. It is an additional proof, if proof were wanting, of the degradation of Imperial Rome, that the deed of retribution was due, not to the people whom he taxed; not to the soldiers, whole regiments of whom he had threatened to decimate; not to the knights, of whom scores had been put to death by his orders; not to the n.o.bles, mult.i.tudes of whom had been treated by him with conspicuous infamy; not even to the Senate, which ill.u.s.trious body he had on all occasions deliberately treated with contumely and hatred,--but to the private revenge of an insulted soldier. The weak thin voice of Ca.s.sius Chaereas, tribune of the praetorian cohort, had marked him out for the coa.r.s.e and calumnious banter of the imperial buffoon; and he determined to avenge himself, and at the same time rid the world of a monster. He engaged several accomplices in the conspiracy, which was nearly frustrated by their want of resolution. For four whole days they hesitated, while day after day, Caius presided in person at the b.l.o.o.d.y games of the amphitheatre. On the fifth day (Jan. 24, A.D. 41), feeling unwell after one of his gluttonous suppers, he was indisposed to return to the shows, but at last rose to do so at the solicitation of his attendants. A vaulted corridor led from the palace to the circus, and in that corridor Caius met a body of n.o.ble Asiatic boys, who were to dance a Pyrrhic dance and sing a laudatory ode upon the stage. Caius wished them at once to practice a rehearsal in his presence, but their leader excused himself on the grounds of hoa.r.s.eness. At this moment Chaereas asked him for the watchword of the night. He gave the watchword, "Jupiter." "Receive him in his wrath!"

exclaimed Chaereas, striking him on the throat, while almost at the same moment the blow of Sabinus cleft the tyrant's jaw, and brought him to his knee. He crouched his limbs together to screen himself from further blows, screaming aloud, "I live! I live!" The bearers of his litter rushed to his a.s.sistance, and fought with their poles, but Caius fell pierced with thirty wounds; and, leaving the body weltering in its blood, the conspirators rushed out of the palace, and took measures to concert with the Senate a restoration of the old Republic. On the very night after the murder the consuls gave to Chaereas the long-forgotten watchword of "Liberty." But this little gleam of hope proved delusive to the last degree. It was believed that the unquiet ghost of the murdered madman haunted the palace, and long before it had been laid to rest by the forms of decent sepulchre, a new emperor of the great Julian family was securely seated upon the throne.

CHAPTER VI.

THE REIGN OF CLAUDIUS, AND THE BANISHMENT OF SENECA.

While the senators were deliberating, the soldiers were acting. They felt a true, though degraded, instinct that to restore the ancient forms of democratic freedom would be alike impossible and useless, and with them the only question lay between the rival claimants for the vacant power. Strange to say that, among these claimants, no one seems ever to have thought of mentioning the prince who became the actual successor.

There was living in the palace at this time a brother of the great Germanicus, and consequently an uncle of the late emperor, whose name was Claudius Caesar. Weakened both in mind and body by the continuous maladies of an orphaned infancy, kept under the cruel tyranny of a barbarous slave, the unhappy youth had lived in despised obscurity among the members of a family who were utterly ashamed of him. His mother Antonia called him a monstrosity, which Nature had begun but never finished; and it became a proverbial expression with her, as is said to have been the case with the mother of the great Wellington, to say of a dull person, "that he was a greater fool than her son Claudius." His grandmother Livia rarely deigned to address him except in the briefest and bitterest terms. His sister Livilla execrated the mere notion of his ever becoming emperor. Augustus, his grandfather by adoption, took pains to keep him as much out of sight as possible, as a wool-gathering[26] and discreditable member of the family, denied him all public honours, and left him a most paltry legacy. Tiberius, when looking out for a successor, deliberately pa.s.sed him over as a man of deficient intellect. Caius kept him as a b.u.t.t for his own slaps and blows, and for the low buffoonery of his meanest jesters. If the unhappy Claudius came late for dinner, he would find every place occupied, and peer about disconsolately amid insulting smiles. If, as was his usual custom, he dropped asleep, after a meal, he was pelted with olives and date-stones, or rough stockings were drawn over his hands that he might be seen rubbing his face with them when he was suddenly awaked.

[Footnote 26: He calls him [Greek meteoros] which implies awkwardness and constant absence of mind.]

This was the unhappy being who was now summoned to support the falling weight of empire. While rummaging the palace for plunder, a common soldier had spied a pair of feet protruding from under the curtains which shaded the sides of an upper corridor. Seizing these feet, and inquiring who owned them, he dragged out an uncouth, panic-stricken mortal, who immediately prostrated himself at his knees and begged hard for mercy. It was Claudius, who scared out of his wits by the tragedy which he had just beheld, had thus tried to conceal himself until the storm was pa.s.sed. "Why, this is Germanicus!" [27] exclaimed the soldier, "let's make him emperor." Half joking and half in earnest, they hoisted him on their shoulders--for terror had deprived him of the use of his legs--and hurried him off to the camp of the Praetorians. Miserable and anxious he reached the camp, an object of compa.s.sion to the crowd of pa.s.sers-by, who believed that he was being hurried off to execution. But the soldiers, who well knew their own interests, accepted him with acclamations, the more so as, by a fatal precedent, he promised them a largess of more than 80_l_. apiece. The supple Agrippa (the Herod of Acts xii.), seeing how the wind lay, offered to plead his cause with the Senate, and succeeded partly by arguments, partly by intimidation, and partly by holding out the not unreasonable hopes of a great improvement on the previous reign.

[Footnote 27: The full name of Claudius was Tiberius Claudius Drusus Caesar Germanicus.]

For although Claudius had been accused of gambling and drunkenness, not only were no _worse_ sins laid to his charge, but he had successfully established some claim to being considered a learned man. Had fortune blessed him till death with a private station, he might have been the Lucien Bonaparte of his family--a studious prince, who preferred the charms of literature to the turmoil of ambition. The anecdotes which have been recorded of him show that he was something of an archaeologist, and something of a philologian. The great historian Livy, pitying the neglect with which the poor young man was treated, had encouraged him in the study of history; and he had written memoirs of his own time, memoirs of Augustus, and even a history of the civil wars since the battle of Actium, which was so correct and so candid that his family indignantly suppressed it as a fresh proof of his stupidity.

Such was the man who, at the age of fifty, became master of the civilized world. He offers some singular points of resemblance to our own "most mighty and dread sovereign," King James I. Both were learned, and both were eminently unwise;[28] both of them were authors, and both of them were pedants; both of them delegated their highest powers to worthless favourites, and both of them enriched these favourites with such foolish liberality that they remained poor themselves. Both of them had been terrified into const.i.tutional cowardice by their involuntary presence at deeds of blood. Both of them, though of naturally good dispositions, were misled by selfishness into acts of cruelty; and both of them, though laborious in the discharge of duty, succeeded only in rendering royalty ridiculous. King James kept Sir Walter Raleigh in prison, and Claudius drove Seneca into exile. The parallel, so far as I am aware, has never been noticed, but is susceptible of being drawn out into the minutest particulars.

[Footnote 28: "Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers," says our own poet.

Herac.l.i.tus had said the same thing more than two thousand years before him, [Greek: polumaoiae ou didasho].]

One of his first acts was to recall his nieces, Julia and Agrippina, from the exile into which their brother had driven them; and both these princesses were destined to effect a powerful influence on the life of our philosopher.

What part Seneca had taken during the few troubled days after the murder of Caius we do not know. Had he taken a leading part--had he been one of those who, like Chaereas, opposed the election of Claudius as being merely the subst.i.tution of an imbecile for a lunatic,--or who, like Sabinus, refused to survive the accession of another Caesar,--we should perhaps have heard of it; and we must therefore a.s.sume either that he was still absent from Rome in the retirement into which he had been driven by the jealousy of Caius, or that he contented himself with quietly watching the course of events. It will be observed that his biography is not like that of Cicero, with whose life we are acquainted in most trifling details; but that the curtain rises and falls on isolated scenes, throwing into sudden brilliancy or into the deepest shade long and important periods of his history. Nor are his letters and other writings full of those political and personal allusions which convert them into an autobiography. They are, without exception, occupied exclusively with philosophical questions, or else they only refer to such personal reminiscences as may best be converted into the text for some Stoical paradox or moral declamation. It is, however, certain from the sequel that Seneca must have seized the opportunity of Caius's death to emerge from his politic obscurity, and to occupy a conspicuous and brilliant position in the imperial court.

It would have been well for his own happiness and fame if he had adopted the wiser and manlier course of acting up to the doctrines he professed.

A court at most periods is, as the poet says,

"A golden but a fatal circle, Upon whose magic skirts a thousand devils In crystal forms sit tempting Innocence, And beckon early Virtue from its centre;"

but the court of a Caius, of a Claudius, or of a Nero, was indeed a place wherein few of the wise could find a footing, and still fewer of the good. And all that Seneca gained from his career of ambition was to be suspected by the first of these Emperors, banished by the second, and murdered by the third.

The first few acts of Claudius showed a sensible and kindly disposition; but it soon became fatally obvious that the real powers of the government would be wielded, not by the timid and absent-minded Emperor, but by any one who for the time being could acquire an ascendency over his well-intentioned but feeble disposition. Now, the friends and confidents of Claudius had long been chosen from the ranks of his freedmen. As under Louis XI. and Don Miguel, the barbers of these monarchs were the real governors, so Claudius was but the minister rather than the master of Narcissus his private secretary, of Polybius his literary adviser, and of Pallas his accountant. A third person, with whose name Scripture has made us familiar, was a freedman of Claudius.

This was Felix, the brother of Pallas, and that Procurator who, though he had been the husband or the paramour of three queens, trembled before the simple eloquence of a feeble and imprisoned Jew.[29] These men became proverbial for their insolence and wealth; and once, when Claudius was complaining of his own poverty, some one wittily replied, "that he would have abundance if two of his freedmen would but admit him into partnership with them."

[Footnote 29: Acts xix.]

But these men gained additional power from the countenance and intrigues of the young and beautiful wife of Claudius, Valeria Messalina. In his marriage, as in all else, Claudius had been pre-eminent in misfortune.

He lived in an age of which the most frightful sign of depravity was that its women were, if possible, a shade worse than its men; and it was the misery of Claudius, as it finally proved his ruin, to have been united by marriage to the very worst among them all. Princesses like the Berenice, and the Drusilla, and the Salome, and the Herodias of the sacred historians were in this age a familiar spectacle; but none of them were so wicked as two at least of Claudius's wives. He was betrothed or married no less than five times. The lady first destined for his bride had been repudiated because her parents had offended Augustus; the next died on the very day intended for her nuptials. By his first actual wife, Urgulania, whom he had married in early youth, he had two children, Drusus and Claudia; Drusus was accidentally choked in boyhood while trying to swallow a pear which had been thrown up into the air. Very shortly after the birth of Claudia, discovering the 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 a.s.sumed 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. Circ.u.mstances--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 sh.o.r.es 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 circ.u.mstances 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 grat.i.tude, whether his ultimate conviction of my innocence be due to his knowledge or to his will."

This pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sed 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 coa.r.s.e personality. We are told that on one occasion even the furious and b.l.o.o.d.y 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.