SENECA'S RECALL FROM EXILE.
Of the last five years of Seneca's weary exile no trace has been
preserved to us. What were his alternations of hope and fear, of
devotion to philosophy and of hankering after the world which he had
lost, we cannot tell. Any hopes which he may have entertained respecting
the intervention of Polybius in his favour must have been utterly
quenched when he heard that the freedman, though formerly powerful with
Messalina, had forfeited his own life in consequence of her
machinations. But the closing period of his days in Corsica must have
brought him thrilling news, which would save him from falling into
absolute despair.
For the career of Messalina was drawing rapidly to a close. The life of
this beautiful princess, short as it was, for she died at a very early
age, was enough to make her name a proverb of everlasting infamy. For a
time she appeared irresistible. Her personal fascination had won for her
an unlimited sway over the facile mind of Claudius, and she had either
won over by her intrigues, or terrified by her pitiless severity, the
noblest of the Romans and the most powerful of the freedmen. But we see
in her fate, as we see on every page of history, that vice ever carries
with it the germ of its own ruin, and that a retribution, which is all
the more inevitable from being often slow, awaits every violation of the
moral law.
There is something almost incredible in the penal infatuation which
brought about her fall. During the absence of her husband at Ostia, she
wedded in open day with C. Silius, the most beautiful and the most
promising of the young Roman nobles. She had apparently persuaded
Claudius that this was merely a mock-marriage, intended to avert some
ominous auguries which threatened to destroy "the husband of Messalina;"
but, whatever Claudius may have imagined, all the rest of the world knew
the marriage to be real, and regarded it not only as a vile enormity,
but also as a direct attempt to bring about a usurpation of the
imperial power.
It was by this view of the case that the freedman Narcissus roused the
inert spirit and timid indignation of the injured Emperor. While the
wild revelry of the wedding ceremony was at its height, Vettius Valens,
a well-known physician of the day, had in the license of the festival
struggled up to the top of a lofty tree, and when they asked him what he
saw, he replied in words which, though meant for jest, were full of
dreadful significance, "I see a fierce storm approaching from Ostia." He
had scarcely uttered the words when first an uncertain rumour, and then
numerous messengers brought the news that Claudius knew all, and was
coming to take vengeance. The news fell like a thunderbolt on the
assembled guests. Silius, as though nothing had happened, went to
transact his public duties in the Forum; Messalina instantly sending for
her children, Octavia and Britannicus, that she might meet her husband
with them by her side, implored the protection of Vibidia, the eldest of
the chaste virgins of Vesta, and, deserted by all but three companions,
fled on foot and unpitied, through the whole breadth of the city, until
she reached the Ostian gate, and mounted the rubbish-cart of a market
gardener which happened to be passing. But Narcissus absorbed both the
looks and the attention of the Emperor by the proofs and the narrative
of her crimes, and, getting rid of the Vestal by promising her that the
cause of Messalina should be tried, he hurried Claudius forward, first
to the house of Silius, which abounded with the proofs of his guilt, and
then to the camp of the Praetorians, where swift vengeance was taken on
the whole band of those who had been involved in Messalina's crimes. She
meanwhile, in alternative paroxysms of fury and abject terror, had taken
refuge in the garden of Lucullus, which she had coveted and made her own
by injustice. Claudius, who had returned home, and had recovered some of
his facile equanimity in the pleasures of the table, showed signs of
relenting; but Narcissus knew that delay was death, and on his own
authority sent a tribune and centurions to despatch the Empress. They
found her prostrate on the ground at the feet of her mother Lepida, with
whom in her prosperity she had quarrelled, but who now came to pity and
console her misery, and to urge her to that voluntary death which alone
could save her from imminent and more cruel infamy. But the mind of
Messalina, like that of Nero afterwards, was so corrupted by wickedness
that not even such poor nobility was left in her as is implied in the
courage of despair. While she wasted the time in tears and lamentations,
a noise was heard of battering at the doors, and the tribune stood by
her in stern silence, the freedman with slavish vituperation. First she
took the dagger in her irresolute hand, and after she had twice stabbed
herself in vain, the tribune drove home the fatal blow, and the corpse
of Messalina, like that of Jezebel, lay weltering in its blood in the
plot of ground of which her crimes had robbed its lawful owner.
Claudius, still lingering at his dinner, was informed that she had
perished, and neither asked a single question at the time, nor
subsequently displayed the slightest sign of anger, of hatred, of pity,
or of any human emotion.
The absolute silence of Seneca respecting the woman who had caused him
the bitterest anguish and humiliation of his life is, as we have
remarked already, a strange and significant phenomenon. It is clearly
not due to accident, for the vices which he is incessantly describing
and denouncing would have found in this miserable woman their most
flagrant illustration, nor could contemporary history have furnished a
more apposite example of the vindication by her fate of the stern
majesty of the moral law. But yet, though Seneca had every reason to
loathe her character and to detest her memory, though he could not have
rendered to his patrons a more welcome service than by blackening her
reputation, he never so much as mentions her name. And this honourable
silence gives us a favourable insight into his character. For it can
only be due to his pitying sense of the fact that even Messalina, bad as
she undoubtedly was, had been judged already by a higher Power, and had
met her dread punishment at the hand of God. It has been conjectured,
with every appearance of probability, that the blackest of the scandals
which were believed and circulated respecting her had their origin in
the published autobiography of her deadly enemy and victorious
successor. The many who had had a share in Messalina's fall would be
only too glad to poison every reminiscence of her life; and the deadly
implacable hatred of the worst woman who ever lived would find peculiar
gratification in scattering every conceivable hue of disgrace over the
acts of a rival whose young children it was her dearest object to
supplant. That Seneca did not deign to chronicle even of an enemy what
Agrippina was not ashamed to write,--that he spared one whom it was
every one's interest and pleasure to malign,--that he regarded her
terrible fall as a sufficient claim to pity, as it was a sufficient
Nemesis upon her crimes,--is a trait in the character of the philosopher
which has hardly yet received the credit which it deserves.