are
described by the geographer Strabo as being "wilder than the wild
beasts." It produced but little corn, and scarcely any fruit-trees. It
abounded, indeed, in swarms of wild bees, but its very honey was bitter
and unpalatable, from being infected with the acrid taste of the
box-flowers on which they fed. Neither gold nor silver were found
there; it produced nothing worth exporting, and barely sufficient for
the mere necessaries of its inhabitants; it rejoiced in no great
navigable rivers, and even the trees, in which it abounded, were neither
beautiful nor fruitful. Seneca describes it in more than one of his
epigrams, as a

"Terrible isle, when earliest summer glows
Yet fiercer when his face the dog-star shows;"

and again as a

"Barbarous land, which rugged rocks surround,
Whose horrent cliffs with idle wastes are crowned,
No autumn fruit, no tilth the summer yields,
Nor olives cheer the winter-silvered fields:
Nor joyous spring her tender foliage lends,
Nor genial herb the luckless soil befriends;
Nor bread, nor sacred fire, nor freshening wave;--
Nought here--save exile, and the exile's grave!"

In such a place, and under such conditions, Seneca had ample need for
all his philosophy. And at first it did not fail him. Towards the close
of his first year of exile he wrote the "Consolation to his mother
Helvia," which is one of the noblest and most charming of all his works.

He had often thought, he said, of writing to console her under this deep
and wholly unlooked-for trial, but hitherto he had abstained from doing
so, lest, while his own anguish and hers were fresh, he should only
renew the pain of the wound by his unskilful treatment. He waited,
therefore till time had laid its healing hand upon her sorrows,
especially because he found no precedent for one in his position
condoling with others when he himself seemed more in need of
consolation, and because something new and admirable would be required
of a man who, as it were, raised his head from the funeral pyre to
console his friends. Still he now feels impelled to write to her,
because to alleviate her regrets will be to lay aside his own. He does
not attempt to conceal from her the magnitude of the misfortune, because
so far from being a mere novice in sorrow, she has tasted it from her
earliest years in all its varieties; and because his purpose was to
conquer her grief, not to extenuate i