Eight years of exile on Corsica
Banished from Rome at the height of his career, Seneca turned exile into a lesson in what we really need.
In 41 AD, the new emperor Claudius exiled Seneca to Corsica. The charge was adultery with Julia Livilla, the emperor’s niece; many historians think the empress Messalina was behind it. Seneca was in his forties and a rising senator.
Corsica was then a rough, rocky island, far from the libraries and politics of Rome. He would spend eight years there.
From exile he wrote a letter of consolation to his mother, Helvia, comforting her for his absence. Exile, he argued, is only a change of place. Nature gives us what we need wherever we are, and the mind travels with us and can be at home anywhere.
Not everything he wrote there was so calm; another letter flattered a palace official in the hope of being recalled. In 49 AD he was finally brought back to Rome. Exile gave him the subject he returned to all his life: losing what you have, and finding out what you still possess.
Sources
- Seneca, Consolation to Helvia
- Seneca, Consolation to Polybius
- Cassius Dio, Roman History 60.8
“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”Lucius Annaeus Seneca
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