CHAPTER IV.

THE TOWER OF SENECA.

"Melius latebam procul ab invidiæ malis Remotus inter Corsici rupes maris." _Roman Tragedy of Octavia._

The Tower of Seneca can be seen at sea, and from a distance of many miles. It stands on a gigantic, quite naked mass of granite, which rises isolated from the mountain-ridge, and bears on its summit the black weather-beaten pile. The ruin consists of a single round tower--lonely and melancholy it stands there, hung with hovering mists, all around bleak heath-covered hills, the sea on both sides deep below.

If, as imaginative tradition affirms, the banished stoic spent eight years of exile here, throning among the clouds, in the silent rocky wilds--then he had found a place not ill adapted for a philosopher disposed to make wise reflections on the world and fate; and to contemplate with wonder and reverence the workings of the eternal elements of nature. The genius of Solitude is the wise man's best instructor; in still night hours he may have given Seneca insight into the world's transitoriness, and shown him the vanity of great Rome, when the exile was inclined to bewail his lot. After Seneca returned from his banishment to Rome, he sometimes, perhaps, among the abominations of the court of Nero, longed for the solitary days of Corsica. There is an old Roman tragedy called _Octavia_, the subject of which is the tragic fate of Nero's first empress.[H] In this tragedy Seneca appears as the moralizing figure, and on one occasion delivers himself as follows:--

"O Lady Fortune, with the flattering smile On thy deceitful face, why hast thou raised One so contented with his humble lot To height so giddy? Wheresoe'er I look, Terrors around me threaten, and at last The deeper fall is sure. Ah, happier far-- Safe from the ills of envy once I hid-- Among the rocks of sea-girt Corsica. I was my own; my soul was free from care, In studious leisure lightly sped the hours. Oh, it was joy,--for in the mighty round Of Nature's works is nothing more divine,-- To look upon the heavens, the sacred sun, With all the motions of the universe, The seasonable change of morn and eve, The orb of Phœbe and the attendant stars, Filling the night with splendour far and wide. All this, when it grows old, shall rush again Back to blind chaos; yea, even now the day, The last dread day is near, and the world's wreck Shall crush this impious race."

A rude sheep-track led us up the mountain over shattered rocks. Half-way up to the tower, completely hidden among crags and bushes, lies a forsaken Franciscan cloister. The shepherds and the wild fig-tree now dwell in its halls, and the raven croaks the _de profundis_. But the morning and the evening still come there to hold their silent devotions, and kindle incense of myrtle, mint, and cytisus. What a fragrant breath of herbs is about us! what morning stillness on the mountains and the sea!

We stood on the Tower of Seneca. We had clambered on hands and feet to reach its walls. By holding fast to projecting ledges and hanging perilously over the abyss, you can gain a window. There is no other entrance into the tower; its outer works are destroyed, but the remains show that a castle, either of the seigniors of Cape Corso or of the Genoese, stood here. The tower is built of astonishingly firm material; its battlements, however, are rent and dilapidated. It is unlikely that Seneca lived on this Aornos, this height forsaken by the very birds, and certainly too lofty a flight for moral philosophers--a race that love the levels. Seneca probably lived in one of the Roman colonies, Aleria or Mariana, where the stoic, accustomed to the conveniences of Roman city life, may have established himself comfortably in some house near the sea; so that the favourite mullet and tunny had not far to travel from the strand to his table.

A picture from the fearfully beautiful world of imperial Rome passed before me as I sat on Seneca's tower. Who can say he rightly and altogether comprehends this world? It often seems to me as if it were Hades, and as if the whole human race of the period were holding in its obscure twilight a great diabolic carnival of fools, dancing a gigantic, universal ballet before the Emperor's throne, while the Emperor sits there gloomy as Pluto, only breaking out now and then into insane laughter; for it is the maddest carnival this; old Seneca plays in it too, among the Pulcinellos, and appears in character with his bathing-tub.

Even a Seneca may have something tragi-comic about him, if we think of him, for example, in the pitiably ludicrous shape in which he is represented in the old statue that bears his name. He stands there naked, a cloth about his loins, in the bath in which he means to die, a sight heart-rending to behold, with his meagre form so tremulous about the knees, and his face so unutterably wo-begone. He resembles one of the old pictures of St. Jerome, or some starveling devotee attenuated by penance; he is tragi-comic, provocative of laughter no less than pity, as many of the representations of the old martyrs are, the form of their suffering being usually so whimsical.

Seneca was born, B.C. 3, at Cordova, in Spain, of equestrian family. His mother, Helvia, was a woman of unusual ability; his father, Lucius Annæus, a rhetorician of note, who removed with his family to Rome. In the time of Caligula, Seneca the younger distinguished himself as an orator, and Stoic philosopher of extraordinary learning. A remarkably good memory had been of service to him. He himself relates that after hearing two thousand names once repeated, he could repeat them again in the same order, and that he had no difficulty in doing the same with two hundred verses.

In favour at the court of Claudius, he owed his fall to Messalina. She accused him of an intrigue with the notorious Julia, the daughter of Germanicus, and the most profligate woman in Rome. The imputation is doubly comical, as coming from a Messalina, and because it makes us think of Seneca the moralist as a Don Juan. It is hard to say how much truth there is in the scandalous story, but Rome was a strange place, and nothing can be more bizarre than some of the characters it produced. Julia was got out of the way, and Don Juan Seneca sent into banishment among the barbarians of Corsica. The philosopher now therefore became, without straining the word, a Corsican bandit.

There was in those days no more terrible punishment than that of exile, because expulsion from Rome was banishment from the world. Eight long years Seneca lived on the wild island. I cannot forgive my old friend, therefore, for recording nothing about its nature, about the history and condition of its inhabitants, at that period. A single chapter from the pen of Seneca on these subjects, would now be of great value to us. But to have said nothing about the barbarous country of his exile, was very consistent with his character as Roman. Haughty, limited, void of sympathetic feeling for his kind, was the man of those times. How different is the relation in which we now stand to nature and history!

For the banished Seneca the island was merely a prison that he detested. The little that he says about it in his book _De Consolatione ad Matrem Helviam_, shows how little he knew of it. For though it was no doubt still more rude and uncultivated than at present, its natural grandeur was the same. He composed the following epigrams on Corsica, which are to be found in his poetical works:--

"Corsican isle, where his town the Phocæan colonist planted, Corsica, called by the Greeks Cyrnus in earlier days, Corsica, less than thy sister Sardinia, longer than Elba, Corsica, traversed by streams--streams that the fisherman loves, Corsica, dreadful land! when thy summer's suns are returning, Scorch'd more cruelly still, when the fierce Sirius shines; Spare the sad exile--spare, I mean, the hopelessly buried-- Over his living remains, Corsica, light lie thy dust."

The second has been said to be spurious, but I do not see why our heart-broken exile should not have been its author, as well as any of his contemporaries or successors in Corsican banishment.

"Rugged the steeps that enclose the barbarous Corsican island, Savage on every side stretches the solitude vast; Autumn ripens no fruits, nor summer prepares here a harvest. Winter, hoary and chill, wants the Palladian gift;[I] Never rejoices the spring in the coolness of shadowy verdure, Here not a blade of grass pierces the desolate plain, Water is none, nor bread, nor a funeral-pile for the stranger-- Two are there here, and no more--the Exile alone with his Wo."[J]

The Corsicans have not failed to take revenge on Seneca. Since he gives them and their country such a disgraceful character, they have connected a scandalous story with his name. Popular tradition has preserved only a single incident from the period of his residence in Corsica, and it is as follows:--As Seneca sat in his tower and looked down into the frightful island, he saw the Corsican virgins, that they were fair. Thereupon the philosopher descended, and he dallied with the daughters of the land. One comely shepherdess did he honour with his embrace; but the kinsfolk of the maiden came upon him suddenly, and took him, and scourged the philosopher with nettles.

Ever since, the nettle grows profusely and ineradicably round the Tower of Seneca, as a warning to moral philosophers. The Corsicans call it _Ortica de Seneca_.

Unhappy Seneca! He is always getting into tragi-comic situations. A Corsican said to me: "You have read what Seneca says of us? _ma era un birbone_--but he was a great rascal." _Seneca morale_, says Dante,--_Seneca birbone_, says the Corsican--another instance of his love for his country.

Other sighs of exile did the unfortunate philosopher breathe out in verse--some epigrams to his friends, one on his native city of Cordova. If Seneca wrote any of the tragedies which bear his name in Corsica, it must certainly have been the Medea. Where could he have found a locality more likely to have inspired him to write on a subject connected with the Argonauts, than this sea-girt island? Here he might well make his chorus sing those remarkable verses which predict Columbus:--

"A time shall come In the late ages, When Ocean shall loosen The bonds of things; Open and vast Then lies the earth; Then shall Tiphys New worlds disclose. And Thule no more Be the farthest land."

Now the great navigator Columbus was born in the Genoese territory, not far from Corsica. The Corsicans will have it that he was born in Calvi, in Corsica itself, and they maintain this till the present day.