It was a calamity which
might have shaken the fortitude of the very noblest soul, and it had by
no means come upon him single handed. Already he had lost his wife, he
had suffered from acute and chronic ill-health, he had been bereaved but
three weeks previously of another little son. He had been cut short by
the jealousy of one emperor from a career of splendid success; he was
now banished by the imbecile subservience of another from all that he
held most dear.
We are hardly able to conceive the intensity of anguish with which an
ancient Roman generally regarded the thought of banishment. In the long
melancholy wail of Ovid's "Tristia;" in the bitter and heart-rending
complaints of Cicero's "Epistles," we may see something of that intense
absorption in the life of Rome which to most of her eminent citizens
made a permanent separation from the city and its interests a thought
almost as terrible as death itself. Even the stoical and heroic Thrasea
openly confessed that he should prefer death to exile. To a heart so
affectionate, to a disposition so social, to a mind so active and
ambitious as that of Seneca, it must have been doubly bitter to exchange
the happiness of his family circle, the splendour of an imperial court,
the luxuries of enormous wealth, the refined society of statesmen, and
the ennobling intercourse of philosophers for the savage wastes of a
rocky island and the society of boorish illiterate islanders, or at the
best, of a few other political exiles, all of whom would be as miserable
as himself, and some of whom would probably have deserved their fate.
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