CHAPTER VII.
SENECA IN EXILE.
So, in A.D.41, in the prime of life and the full vigour of his faculties, with a name stained by a charge of which he may have been innocent, but of which he was condemned as guilty, Seneca bade farewell to his noble-minded mother, to his loving aunt, to his brothers, the beloved Gallio and the literary Mela, to his nephew, the ardent and promising young Lucan, and, above all--which cost him the severest pang--to Marcus, his sweet and prattling boy.

It was a calamity which might have shaken the fortitude of the very noblest soul, and it had by no means come upon him single handed.

Already he had lost his wife, he had suffered from acute and chronic ill-health, he had been bereaved but three weeks previously of another little son.

He had been cut short by the jealousy of one emperor from a career of splendid success; he was now banished by the imbecile subservience of another from all that he held most dear.
We are hardly able to conceive the intensity of anguish with which an ancient Roman generally regarded the thought of banishment.

In the long melancholy wail of Ovid's "Tristia;" in the bitter and heart-rending complaints of Cicero's "Epistles," we may see something of that intense absorption in the life of Rome which to most of her eminent citizens made a permanent separation from the city and its interests a thought almost as terrible as death itself.