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 gods 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 class, from the peculiar imbecility of his character,
was under the powerful influence of this class 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 illustrious 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 coarse 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 illustrious 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 fortitude, for the climax of which, no
doubt, the whole piece of interested flattery was composed. For this
passage, 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 asserting 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 passages 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 crapulous 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 noblest moments he might have blushed.