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[Footnote 27: The full name of Claudius was Tiberius Claudius Drusus
Caesar Germanicus.]

For although Claudius had been accused of gambling and drunkenness, not
only were no worse sins laid to his charge, but he had successfully
established some claim to being considered a learned man. Had fortune
blessed him till death with a private station, he might have been the
Lucien Bonaparte of his family--a studious prince, who preferred the
charms of literature to the turmoil of ambition. The anecdotes which
have been recorded of him show that he was something of an
archaeologist, and something of a philologian. The great historian Livy,
pitying the neglect with which the poor young man was treated, had
encouraged him in the study of history; and he had written memoirs of
his own time, memoirs of Augustus, and even a history of the civil wars
since the battle of Actium, which was so correct and so candid that his
family indignantly suppressed it as a fresh proof of his stupidity.

Such was the man who, at the age of fifty, became master of the
civilized world. He offers some singular points of resemblance to our
own "most mighty and dread sovereign," King James I. Both were learned,
and both were eminently unwise;[28] both of them were authors, and both
of them were pedants; both of them delegated their highest powers to
worthless favourites, and both of them enriched these favourites with
such foolish liberality that they remained poor themselves. Both of them
had been terrified into constitutional cowardice by their involuntary
presence at deeds of blood. Both of them, though of naturally good
dispositions, were misled by selfishness into acts of cruelty; and both
of them, though laborious in the discharge of duty, succeeded only in
rendering royalty ridiculous. King James kept Sir Walter Raleigh in
prison, and Claudius drove Seneca into exile. The parallel, so far as I
am aware, has never been noticed, but is susceptible of being drawn out
into the minutest particulars.

[Footnote 28: "Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers," says our own poet.
Heraclitus had said the same thing more than two thousand years before
him, [Greek: polumaoiae ou didasho].]

One of his first acts was to recall his nieces, Julia and Agrippina,
from the exile into which their brother had driven them; and both these
princesses were destined to effect a powerful influence on the life of
our philosopher.

What part Seneca had taken during the few troubled days after the murder
of Caius we do not know. Had he taken a leading part--had he been one of
those who, like Chaereas, opposed the election of Claudius as being
merely the substitution of an imbecile for a lunatic,--or who, like
Sabinus, refused to survive the accession of another Caesar,--we should
perhaps have heard of it; and we must therefore assume either that he
was still absent from Rome in the retirement into which he had been
driven by the jealousy of Caius, or that he contented himself with
quietly watching the course of events. It will be observed that his
biography is not like that of Cicero, with whose life we are acquainted
in most trifling details; but that the curtain rises and falls on
isolated scenes, throwing into sudden brilliancy or into the deepest
shade long and important periods of his history. Nor are his letters and
other writings full of those political and personal allusions which
convert them into an autobiography. They are, without exception,
occupied exclusively with philosophical questions, or else they only
refer to such personal reminiscences as may best be converted into the
text for some Stoical paradox or moral declamation. It is, however,
certain from the sequel that Seneca must have seized the opportunity of
Caius's death to emerge from his politic obscurity, and to occupy a
conspicuous and brilliant position in the imperial court.

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