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 circumstances 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 “shaggy 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 noblest and most charming of all his works.