The boyhood of Seneca fell in the last years of the Emperor Augustus, when, in spite of the general decorum and amiability of their ruler, people began to see clearly that nothing was left of liberty except the name.  His youth and early manhood were spent during those three-and-twenty years of the reign of Tiberius, that reign of terror, during which the Roman world was reduced to a frightful silence and torpor as of death;[22] and, although he was not thrown into personal collision with that “brutal monster,” he not unfrequently alludes to him, and to the dangerous power and headlong ruin of his wicked minister Sejanus.  Up to this time he had not experienced in his own person those crimes and horrors which fall to the lot of men who are brought into close contact with tyrants.  This first happened to him in the reign of Caius Caesar, of whom we are enabled, from the writings of Seneca alone, to draw a full-length portrait.

[Footnote 22:  Milton, Paradise Regained, iv. 128.  For a picture of Tiberius as he appeared in his old age at Capreae, “hated of all and hating,” see Id. 90-97.]

Caius Caesar was the son of Germanicus and the elder Agrippina.  Germanicus was the bravest and most successful general, and one of the wisest and most virtuous men, of his day.  His wife Agrippina, in her fidelity, her chastity, her charity, her nobility of mind, was the very model of a Roman matron of the highest and purest stamp.  Strange that the son of such parents should have been one of the vilest, cruelest, and foulest of the human race.  So, however, it was; and it is a remarkable fact that scarcely one of the six children of this marriage displayed the virtues of their father and mother, while two of them, Caius Caesar and the younger Agrippina, lived to earn an exceptional infamy by their baseness and their crimes.  Possibly this unhappy result may have been partly due to the sad circumstances of their early education.  Their father, Germanicus, who by his virtue and his successes had excited the suspicious jealousy of his uncle Tiberius, was by his distinct connivance, if not by his actual suggestion, atrociously poisoned in Syria.  Agrippina, after being subjected to countless cruel insults, was banished in the extremest poverty to the island of Pandataria.  Two of the elder brothers, Nero and Drusus Germanicus, were proclaimed public enemies:  Nero was banished to the island Pontia, and there put to death; Drusus was kept a close prisoner in a secret prison of the palace.  Caius, the youngest, who is better known by the name Caligula, was summoned by Tiberius to his wicked retirement at Capreae, and there only saved his life by the most abject flattery and the most adroit submission.