It is a singular proof of the unutterable dread and detestation inspired by some of these Caesars, that their mere countenance is said to have inspired anguish.  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 his name, and in the composition of which he was certainly concerned.  All these works, and especially the applause won by the public reading of his poems, would have given him that high literary reputation which we know him to have earned.  It was not, however, this reputation, but the brilliancy and eloquence of his orations at the bar which excited the jealous