This passage enables us to conjecture how matters stood.  The avarice of Messalina was so insatiable that the non-confiscation of Seneca’s immense wealth is a proof that, for some reason, her fear or hatred of him was not implacable.  Although it is a remarkable fact that she is barely mentioned, and never once abused, in the writings of Seneca, yet there can be no doubt that the charge was brought by her instigation before the senators; that after a very slight discussion, or none at all, Claudius was, or pretended to be convinced of Seneca’s culpability; that the senators, with their usual abject servility, at once voted him guilty of high treason, and condemned him to death, and the confiscation of his goods; and that Claudius, perhaps from his own respect for literature, perhaps at the intercession of Agrippina, or of some powerful freedman, remitted part of his sentence, just as King James I. remitted all the severest portions of the sentence passed on Francis Bacon.

Neither the belief of Claudius nor the condemnation of the Senate furnish the slightest valid proofs against him.  The Senate at this time were so base and so filled with terror, that on one occasion a mere word of accusation from the freedman of an Emperor was sufficient to make them fall upon one of their number and stab him to death upon the spot with their iron pens.  As for poor Claudius, his administration of justice, patient and laborious as it was, had already grown into a public joke.  On one occasion he wrote down and delivered the wise decision, “that he agreed with the side which had set forth the truth.”  On another occasion, a common Greek whose suit came before him grew so impatient at his stupidity as to exclaim aloud, “You are an old fool.”  We are not informed that the Greek was punished.  Roman usage allowed a good deal of banter and coarse personality.  We are told that on one occasion even the furious and bloody Caligula, seeing a provincial smile, called him up, and asked him what he was laughing at.  “At you,” said the man, “you look such a humbug.”  The grim tyrant was so struck with the humour of the thing that he took no further notice of it.  A Roman knight against whom some foul charge had been trumped up, seeing Claudius listening to the most contemptible and worthless evidence against him, indignantly abused him for his cruel stupidity, and flung his pen and tablets in his face so violently as to cut his cheek.  In fact, the Emperor’s singular absence of mind gave rise to endless anecdotes.  Among other things, when some condemned criminals were to fight as gladiators, and addressed him before the games in the sublime formula—­“Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutamus!” ("Hail, Caesar! doomed to die, we salute thee!”) he gave the singularly inappropriate answer, “Avete vos!” ("Hail ye also!”) which they took as a sign of pardon, and were unwilling to fight until they were actually forced to do so by the gestures of the Emperor.

The decision of such judges as Claudius and his Senate is worth very little in the question of a man’s innocence or guilt; but the sentence was that Seneca should be banished to the island of Corsica.