Seekers after God Part 4

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 n.o.ble-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 fort.i.tude of the very n.o.blest 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 enn.o.bling 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 circ.u.mstances 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 "s.h.a.ggy 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 n.o.blest 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 circ.u.mstances which others would think miserable and because he a.s.sures 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 circ.u.mstances, but in himself. He cannot indeed claim for himself the t.i.tle of wise, for, if so, he would be the most fortunate of men, and near to G.o.d 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 _s.p.a.ce_ 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 circ.u.mstances 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 mult.i.tudes 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 Ma.r.s.eilles 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 s.p.a.ces between them and the causes of their less and greater speed,--while I may contemplate the mult.i.tude 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 s.p.a.ce 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 n.o.ble 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 G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses 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 G.o.d-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 a.s.sail 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 mult.i.tude?

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 amus.e.m.e.nts 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 a.s.suage 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 inters.p.a.ce 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, pa.s.ses 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 att.i.tude 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 G.o.ds 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 cla.s.s, from the peculiar imbecility of his character, was under the powerful influence of this cla.s.s 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 coa.r.s.e 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 fort.i.tude, for the climax of which, no doubt, the whole piece of interested flattery was composed. For this pa.s.sage, 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 a.s.serting 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 pa.s.sages 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 c.r.a.pulous 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 n.o.blest moments he might have blushed.