hatred of the Emperor.  Caius piqued himself on the possession of eloquence; and, strange to say, there are isolated expressions of his which seem to show that, in lucid intervals, he was by no means devoid of intellectual acuteness.  For instance, there is real humour and insight in the nicknames of “a golden sheep” which he gave to the rich and placid Silanus, and of “Ulysses in petticoats,” by which he designated his grandmother, the august Livia.  The two epigrammetic criticisms which he passed upon the style of Seneca are not wholly devoid of truth; he called his works Commissiones meras, or mere displays.[25] In this expression he hit off, happily enough, the somewhat theatrical, the slightly pedantic and pedagogic and professorial character of Seneca’s diction, its rhetorical ornament and antitheses, and its deficiency in stern masculine simplicity and strength.  In another remark he showed himself a still more felicitous critic.  He called Seneca’s writings Arenu sine Calce, “sand without lime,” or, as we might say, “a rope of sand.”  This epigram showed a real critical faculty.  It exactly hits off Seneca’s short and disjointed sentences, consisting as they often do of detached antitheses.  It accords with the amusing comparison of Malebranche, that Seneca’s composition, with its perpetual and futile recurrences, calls up to him the image of a dancer who ends where he begins.

[Footnote 25:  Suet. Calig. liii.]

But Caius did not confine himself to clever and malignant criticism.  On one occasion, when Seneca was pleading in his presence, he was so jealous and displeased at the brilliancy and power of the orator that he marked him out for immediate execution.  Had Seneca died at this period he would probably have been little known, and he might have left few traces of his existence beyond a few tragedies of uncertain authenticity, and possibly a passing notice in the page of Dio or Tacitus.  But destiny reserved him for a more splendid and more questionable career.  One of Caius’s favourites whispered to the Emperor that it was useless to extinguish a waning lamp; that the health of the orator was so feeble that a natural death by the progress of his consumptive tendencies would, in a very short time, remove him out of the tyrant’s way.

Throughout the remainder of the few years during which the reign of Caius continued, Seneca, warned in time, withdrew himself into complete obscurity, employing his enforced leisure in that unbroken industry which stored his mind with such encyclopaedic wealth.  “None of my days,” he says, in describing at a later period the way in which he spent his time, “is passed in complete ease.  I claim even a part of the night for my studies.  I do not find leisure for sleep, but I succumb to it, and I keep my eyes at their work even when they are wearied and drooping with watchfulness.  I have retired, not only from men, but from affairs, and especially from my own.  I am doing the work for posterity; I am writing out things which may prove of advantage to them.  I am intrusting to writing healthful admonitions—­compositions, as it were, of useful medicines.”