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. Their very lives were not secure.
Agrippa Posthumus and Nero, the brothers of the Emperor Caligula, had
been so reduced by starvation that both of the wretched youths had been
driven to support life by eating the materials with which their beds
were stuffed. The Emperor Caius had once asked an exile, whom he had
recalled from banishment, in what manner he had been accustomed to
employ his time on the island. "I used," said the flatterer, "to pray
that Tiberius might die, and that you might succeed." It immediately
struck Caius that the exiles whom he had banished might be similarly
employed, and accordingly he sent centurions round the islands to put
them all to death. Such were the miserable circumstances which might be
in store for a political outlaw.[30] If we imagine what must have been
the feelings of a d'Espremenil, when a _lettee de cachet_ consigned him
to a prison in the Isle d'Hieres; or what a man like Burke might have
felt, if he had been compelled to retire for life to the Bermudas; we
may realize to some extent the heavy trial which now befel the life
of Seneca.

[Footnote 30: Among the Jews the homicides who had fled to a city of
refuge were set free on the high priest's death, and, in order _to
prevent them from praying for his death_, the mother and other relatives
of the high priest used to supply them with clothes and other
necessaries. See the author's article on "Asylum" in Kitto's
_Encyclopedia_ (ed. Alexander.)]

Corsica was the island chosen for his place of banishment, and a spot
more uninviting could hardly have been selected. It was an island
"shaggy and savage," intersected from north to south by a chain of wild,
inaccessible mountains, clothed to their summits with gloomy and
impenetrable forests of pine and fir. Its untamable inhabitants