[Footnote 27:  The full name of Claudius was Tiberius Claudius Drusus Caesar Germanicus.]

For although Claudius had been accused of gambling and drunkenness, not only were no worse sins laid to his charge, but he had successfully established some claim to being considered a learned man.  Had fortune blessed him till death with a private station, he might have been the Lucien Bonaparte of his family—­a studious prince, who preferred the charms of literature to the turmoil of ambition.  The anecdotes which have been recorded of him show that he was something of an archaeologist, and something of a philologian.  The great historian Livy, pitying the neglect with which the poor young man was treated, had encouraged him in the study of history; and he had written memoirs of his own time, memoirs of Augustus, and even a history of the civil wars since the battle of Actium, which was so correct and so candid that his family indignantly suppressed it as a fresh proof of his stupidity.

Such was the man who, at the age of fifty, became master of the civilized world.  He offers some singular points of resemblance to our own “most mighty and dread sovereign,” King James I. Both were learned, and both were eminently unwise;[28] both of them were authors, and both of them were pedants; both of them delegated their highest powers to worthless favourites, and both of them enriched these favourites with such foolish liberality that they remained poor themselves.  Both of them had been terrified into constitutional cowardice by their involuntary presence at deeds of blood.  Both of them, though of naturally good dispositions, were misled by selfishness into acts of cruelty; and both of them, though laborious in the discharge of duty, succeeded only in rendering royalty ridiculous.  King James kept Sir Walter Raleigh in prison, and Claudius drove Seneca into exile.  The parallel, so far as I am aware, has never been noticed, but is susceptible of being drawn out into the minutest particulars.

[Footnote 28:  “Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers,” says our own poet.  Heraclitus had said the same thing more than two thousand years before him, [Greek:  polumaoiae ou didasho].]

One of his first acts was to recall his nieces, Julia and Agrippina, from the exile into which their brother had driven them; and both these princesses were destined to effect a powerful influence on the life of our philosopher.

What part Seneca had taken during the few troubled days after the murder of Caius we do not know.  Had he taken a leading part—­had he been one of those who, like Chaereas, opposed the election of Claudius as being merely the substitution of an imbecile for a lunatic,—­or who, like Sabinus, refused to survive the accession of another Caesar,—­we should perhaps have heard of it; and we must therefore assume either that he was still absent from Rome in the retirement into which he had been driven by the jealousy of Caius, or that he contented himself with