Even the stoical and heroic Thrasea openly confessed that he should prefer death to exile.

To a heart so affectionate, to a disposition so social, to a mind so active and ambitious as that of Seneca, it must have been doubly bitter to exchange the happiness of his family circle, the splendour of an imperial court, the luxuries of enormous wealth, the refined society of statesmen, and the ennobling intercourse of philosophers for the savage wastes of a rocky island and the society of boorish illiterate islanders, or at the best, of a few other political exiles, all of whom would be as miserable as himself, and some of whom would probably have deserved their fate.
The Mediteranean rocks selected for political exiles--Gyaros, Seriphos, Scyathos, Patmos, Pontia, Pandataria--were generally rocky, barren, fever-stricken places, chosen by design as the most wretched conceivable spots in which human life could be maintained at all.

Yet these islands were crowded with exiles, and in them were to be found not a few princesses of Caesarian origin.

We must not draw a parallel to their position from that of an Eleanor, the wife of Duke Humphrey, immured in Peel Castle in the Isle of Man, or of a Mary Stuart in the Isle of Loch Levin--for it was something incomparably worse.

No care was taken even to provide for their actual wants.