ish. Tacitus, in the life of his father-in-law Agricola,
mentions the shuddering recollection of the red face of Domitian, as it
looked on at the games. Seneca speaks in one place of wretches doomed to
undergo stones, sword, fire, and _Caius_; in another he says that he had
tortured the noblest Romans with everything which could possibly cause
the intensest agony,--with cords, plates, rack, fire, and, as though it
were the worst torture of all, with his look! What that look was, we
learn from Seneca himself, "His face was ghastly pale, with a look of
insanity; his fierce, dull eyes were half-hidden under a wrinkled brow;
his ill-shaped head was partly bald, partly covered with dyed-hair; his
neck covered with bristles, his legs thin, and his feet mis-shapen." Woe
to the nation that lies under the heel of a brutal despotism; treble woe
to the nation that can tolerate a despot so brutal as this! Yet this was
the nation in the midst of which Seneca lived, and this was the despot
under whom his early manhood was spent.

"But what more oft in nations grown corrupt,
And by their vices brought to servitude,
Than to love bondage more than liberty,
Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty?"

It was one of the peculiarities of Caius Caesar that he hated the very
existence of any excellence. He used to bully and insult the gods
themselves, frowning even at the statues of Apollo and Jupiter of the
Capitol. He thought of abolishing Homer, and order the works of Livy and
Virgil to be removed from all libraries, because he could not bear that
they should be praised. He ordered Julius Graecinus to be put to death
for no other reason than this, "That he was a better man than it was
expedient for a tyrant that any one should be;" for, as Pliny tells us,
the Caesars deliberately preferred that their people should be vicious
than that they should be virtuous. It was hardly likely that such a man
should view with equanimity the rising splendour of Seneca's reputation.
Hitherto, the young man, who was thirty-five years old at the accession
of Caius, had not written any of his philosophic works, but in all
probability he had published his early, and no longer extant, treatises
on earthquakes, on superstitions, and the books _On India_, and _On the
Manners of Egypt_, which had been the fruit of his early travels. It is
probable, too, that he had recited in public some of those tragedies
which have come down to us under