POLITICAL CONDITION OF ROME UNDER TIBERIUS AND CAIUS.
The personal notices of Seneca's life up to the period of his manhood
are slight and fragmentary. From an incidental expression we conjecture
that he visited his aunt in Egypt when her husband was Prefect of that
country, and that he shared with her the dangers of shipwreck when her
husband had died on board ship during the homeward voyage. Possibly the
visit may have excited in his mind that deep interest and curiosity
about the phenomena of the Nile which appear so strongly in several
passages of his _Natural Questions_; and, indeed nothing is more likely
than that he suggested to Nero the earliest recorded expedition to
discover the source of the mysterious river. No other allusion to his
travels occur in his writings, but we may infer that from very early
days he had felt an interest for physical inquiry, since while still a
youth he had written a book on earthquakes; which has not come down
to us.
Deterred by his father from the pursuit of philosophy, he entered on the
duties of a profession. He became an advocate, and distinguished himself
by his genius and eloquence in pleading causes. Entering on a political
career, he became a successful candidate for the quaestorship, which
was an important step towards the highest offices of the state. During
this period of his life he married a lady whose name has not been
preserved to us, and to whom we have only one allusion, which is a
curious one. As in our own history it has been sometimes the fashion for
ladies of rank to have dwarves and negroes among their attendants, so it
seems to have been the senseless and revolting custom of the Roman
ladies of this time to keep idiots among the number of their servants.
The first wife of Seneca had followed this fashion, and Seneca in his
fiftieth letter to his friend Lucilius[21] makes the following
interesting allusion to the fact. "You know," he says, "that my wife's
idiot girl Harpaste has remained in my house as a burdensome legacy. For
personally I feel the profoundest dislike to monstrosities of that kind.
If ever I want to amuse myself with an idiot, I have not far to look for
one. I laugh at myself. This idiot girl has suddenly become blind. Now,
incredible as the story seems, it is really true that she is unconscious
of her blindness, and consequently begs her attendant to go elsewhere,
because the house is dark. But you may be sure that this, at which we
laugh in her, happens to us all; no one understands that he is
avaricious or covetous. The blind seek for a guide; _we_ wander about
without a guide."
[Footnote 21: It will be observed that the main biographical facts about
the life of Seneca are to be gleaned from his letters to Lucilius, who
was his constant friend from youth to old age, and to whom he has
dedicated his Natural Questions. Lucilius was a procurator of Sicily, a
man of cultivated taste and high principle. He was the author of a poem
on Aetna, which in the opinion of many competent judges is the poem
which has come down to us, and has been attributed to Varus, Virgil, and
others. It has been admirably edited by Mr. Munro. (See _Nat. Quaest._,
iv. _ad init. Ep_. lxxix.) He also wrote a poem on the fountain
Arethusa. _(Nat. Quaest_. iii, 26.)]
This passage will furnish us with an excellent example of Seneca's
invariable method of improving every occasion and circumstance into an
opportunity for a philosophic harangue.
By this wife, who died shortly before Seneca's banishment to Corsica, he
had two sons, one of whom expired in the arms and amid the kisses of
Helvia less than a month before Seneca's departure for Corsica. To the
other, whose name was Marcus, he makes the following pleasant allusion.
After urging his mother Helvia to find consolation in the devotion of
his brothers Gallio and Mela, he adds, "From these turn your eyes also
on your grandsons--to Marcus, that most charming little boy, in sight of
whom no melancholy can last long. No misfortune in the breast of any one
can have been so great or so recent as not to be soothed by his
caresses. Whose tears would not his mirth repress? whose mind would not
his prattling loose from the pressure of anxiety? whom will not that
joyous manner of his incline to jesting? whose attention, even though he
be fixed in thought, will not be attracted and absorbed by that
childlike garrulity of which no one can grow tired? God grant that he
may survive me: may all the cruelty of destiny be weared out on me!"
Whether the prayer of Seneca was granted we do not know; but, as we do
not again hear of Marcus, it is probable that he died before his father,
and that the line of Seneca, like that of so many great men, became
extinct in the second generation.
It was probably during this period that Seneca laid the foundations of
that enormous fortune which excited the hatred and ridicule of his
opponents. There is every reason to believe that this fortune was
honourably gained. As both his father and mother were wealthy, he had
doubtless inherited an ample competency; this was increased by the
lucrative profession of a successful advocate, and was finally swollen
by the princely donations of his pupil Nero. It is not improbable that
Seneca, like Cicero, and like all the wealthy men of their day,
increased his property by lending money upon interest. No disgrace
attached to such a course; and as there is no proof for the charges of
Dio Cassius on this head, we may pass them over with silent contempt.
Dio gravely informs us that Seneca excited an insurrection in Britain,
by suddenly calling in the enormous sum of 40,000,000 sesterces; but
this is in all probability the calumny of a professed enemy. We shall
refer again to Seneca's wealth; but we may here admit that it was
undoubtedly ungraceful and incongruous in a philosopher who was
perpetually dwelling on the praises of poverty, and that even in his own
age it attracted unfavourable notice, as we may see from the epithet
_Proedives_, "the over-wealthy," which is applied to him alike by a
satiric poet and by a grave historian. Seneca was perfectly well aware
that this objection could be urged against him, and it must be admitted
that the grounds on which he defends himself in his treatise _On a Happy
Life_ are not very conclusive or satisfactory.
The boyhood of Seneca fell in the last years of the Emperor Augustus,
when, in spite of the general decorum and amiability of their ruler,
people began to see clearly that nothing was left of liberty except the
name. His youth and early manhood were spent during those
three-and-twenty years of the reign of Tiberius, that reign of terror,
during which the Roman world was reduced to a frightful silence and
torpor as of death;[22] and, although he was not thrown into personal
collision with that "brutal monster," he not unfrequently alludes to
him, and to the dangerous power and headlong ruin of his wicked minister
Sejanus. Up to this time he had not experienced in his own person those
crimes and horrors which fall to the lot of men who are brought into
close contact with tyrants. This first happened to him in the reign of
Caius Caesar, of whom we are enabled, from the writings of Seneca alone,
to draw a full-length portrait.
[Footnote 22: Milton, _Paradise Regained_, iv. 128. For a picture of
Tiberius as he appeared in his old age at Capreae, "hated of all and
hating," see Id. 90-97.]
Caius Caesar was the son of Germanicus and the elder Agrippina.
Germanicus was the bravest and most successful general, and one of the
wisest and most virtuous men, of his day. His wife Agrippina, in her
fidelity, her chastity, her charity, her nobility of mind, was the very
model of a Roman matron of the highest and purest stamp. Strange that
the son of such parents should have been one of the vilest, cruelest,
and foulest of the human race. So, however, it was; and it is a
remarkable fact that scarcely one of the six children of this marriage
displayed the virtues of their father and mother, while two of them,
Caius Caesar and the younger Agrippina, lived to earn an exceptional
infamy by their baseness and their crimes. Possibly this unhappy result
may have been partly due to the sad circumstances of their early
education. Their father, Germanicus, who by his virtue and his successes
had excited the suspicious jealousy of his uncle Tiberius, was by his
distinct connivance, if not by his actual suggestion, atrociously
poisoned in Syria. Agrippina, after being subjected to countless cruel
insults, was banished in the extremest poverty to the island of
Pandataria. Two of the elder brothers, Nero and Drusus Germanicus, were
proclaimed public enemies: Nero was banished to the island Pontia, and
there put to death; Drusus was kept a close prisoner in a secret prison
of the palace. Caius, the youngest, who is better known by the name
Caligula, was summoned by Tiberius to his wicked retirement at Capreae,
and there only saved his life by the most abject flattery and the most
adroit submission.
Capreae is a little island of surpassing loveliness, forming one
extremity of the Bay of Naples. Its soil is rich, its sea bright and
limpid, its breezes cool and healthful. Isolated by its position, it is
yet within easy reach of Rome. At that time, before Vesuvius had
rekindled those wasteful fires which first shook down, and then deluged
under lava and scoriae, the little cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii,
the scene which it commanded was even more pre-eminently beautiful than
now. Vineyards and olive-groves clothed the sides of that matchless bay,
down to the very line where the bright blue waters seem to kiss with
their ripples the many-coloured pebbles of the beach. Over all, with its
sides dotted with picturesque villas and happy villages, towered the
giant cone of the volcano which for centuries had appeared to be
extinct, and which was clothed up to the very crater with luxurious
vegetation. Such was the delicious home which Tiberius disgraced for
ever by the seclusion of his old age. Here he abandoned himself to every
refinement of wickedness, and from hence, being by common consent the
most miserable of men, he wrote to the Senate that memorable letter in
which he confesses his daily and unutterable misery under the stings of
a guilty conscience, which neither solitude nor power enabled him
to escape.
Never did a fairer scene undergo a worse degradation; and here, in one
or other of the twelve villas which Tiberius had built, and among the
azure grottoes which he caused to be constructed, the youthful Caius[23]
grew up to manhood. It would have been a terrible school even for a
noble nature; for a nature corrupt and bloodthirsty like that of Caius
it was complete and total ruin. But, though he was so obsequious to the
Emperor as to originate the jest that never had there been a worse
master and never a more cringing slave,--though he suppressed every sign
of indignation at the horrid deaths of his mother and his
brothers,--though he assiduously reflected the looks, and carefully
echoed the very words, of his patron,--yet not even by the deep
dissimulation which such a position required did he succeed in
concealing from the penetrating eye of Tiberius the true ferocity of his
character. Not being the acknowledged heir to the kingdom,--for Tiberius
Gemellus, the youthful grandson of Tiberius, was living, and Caius was
by birth only his grand-nephew,--he became a tool for the machinations
of Marco the praetorian praefect and his wife Ennia. One of his chief
friends was the cruel Herod Agrippa,[24] who put to death St. James and
imprisoned St. Peter, and whose tragical fate is recorded in the 12th
chap. of the Acts. On one occasion, when Caius had been abusing the
dictator Sulla, Tiberius scornfully remarked that he would have all
Sulla's vices and none of his virtues; and on another, after a quarrel
between Caius and his cousin, the Emperor embraced with tears his young
grandson, and said to the frowning Caius, with one of those strange
flashes of prevision of which we sometimes read in history. "Why are you
so eager? Some day you will kill this boy, and some one else will murder
you." There were some who believed that Tiberius deliberately cherished
the intention of allowing Caius to succeed him, in order that the Roman
world might relent towards his own memory under the tyranny of a worse
monster than himself. Even the Romans, who looked up to the family of
Germanicus with extraordinary affection, seem early to have lost all
hopes about Caius. They looked for little improvement under the
government of a vicious boy, "ignorant of all things, or nurtured only
in the worst," who would be likely to reflect the influence of Macro,
and present the spectacle of a worse Tiberius under a worse Sejanus.
[Footnote 23: We shall call him Caius, because it is as little correct
to write of him by the _sobriquet_ Caligula as it would be habitually to
write of our kings Edward or John as Longshanks or Lackland. The name
Caligula means "a little shoe," and was the pet name given to him by the
soldiers of his father, in whose camp he was born.]
[Footnote 24: Josephus adds some curious and interesting particulars to
the story of this Herod and his death which are not mentioned in the
narrative of St. Luke (_Antiq_. xix. 7, 8. Jahn, _Hebr. Commonwealth_,
§ cxxvi.)]
At last health and strength failed Tiberius, but not his habitual
dissimulation. He retained the same unbending soul, and by his fixed
countenance and measured language, sometimes by an artificial
affability, he tried to conceal his approaching end. After many restless
changes, he finally settled down in a villa at Misenum which had once
belonged to the luxurious Lucullus. There the real state of his health
was discovered. Charicles, a distinguished physician, who had been
paying him a friendly visit on kissing his hand to bid farewell, managed
to ascertain the state of his pulse. Suspecting that this was the case
Tiberius, concealing his displeasure, ordered a banquet to be spread,
as though in honour of his friend's departure, and stayed longer than
usual at table. A similar story is told of Louis XIV. who, noticing from
the whispers of his courtiers that they believed him to be dying, ate an
unusually large dinner on the very day of his death, and sarcastically
observed, "Il me semble que pour un homme qui va mourir je ne mange pas
mal." But, in spite of the precautions of Tiberius, Charicles informed
Macro that the Emperor could not last beyond two days.
A scene of secret intrigue at once began. The court broke up into knots
and cliques. Hasty messengers were sent to the provinces and their
armies, until at last, on the 16th of March, it was believed that
Tiberius had breathed his last. Just as on the death of Louis XV. a
sudden noise was heard as of thunder, the sound of courtiers rushing
along the corridors to congratulate Louis XVI. in the famous words, "Le
roi est mort, vive le roi," so a crowd instantly thronged round Caius
with their congratulations, as he went out of the palace to assume his
imperial authority. Suddenly a message reached him that Tiberius had
recovered voice and sight. Seneca says, that feeling his last hour to be
near, he had taken off his ring, and, holding it in his shut left hand,
had long lain motionless; then calling his servants, since no one
answered his call, he rose from his couch, and, his strength failing
him, after a few tottering steps fell prostrate on the ground.
The news produced the same consternation as that which was produced
among the conspirators at Adonijah's banquet, when they heard of the
measures taken by the dying David. There was a panic-stricken
dispersion, and every one pretended to be grieved, or ignorant of what
was going on. Caius, in stupified silence, expected death instead of
empire. Macro alone did not lose his presence of mind. With the utmost
intrepidity, he gave orders that the old man should be suffocated by
heaping over him a mass of clothes, and that every one should then leave
the chamber. Such was the miserable and unpitied end of the Emperor
Tiberius, in the seventy-eighth year of his age. Such was the death, and
so miserable had been the life, of the man to whom the Tempter had
already given "the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them," when he
tried to tempt with them the Son of God. That this man should have been
the chief Emperor of the earth at a time when its true King was living
as a peasant in his village home at Nazareth, is a fact suggestive of
many and of solemn thoughts.