Lucius Seneca - Yale Required Reading - Collected Works (Vol. 2)

And some there were who lost their eyeballs: O

So fierce a fear of death had fallen on them!

And some, besides, were by oblivion

Of all things seized, that even themselves they knew

No longer. And though corpse on corpse lay piled

Unburied on ground, the race of birds and beasts

Would or spring back, scurrying to escape

The virulent stench, or, if they'd tasted there,

Would languish in approaching death. But yet

Hardly at all during those many suns

Appeared a fowl, nor from the woods went forth

The sullen generations of wild beasts—

They languished with disease and died and died.

In chief, the faithful dogs, in all the streets

Outstretched, would yield their breath distressfully

For so that Influence of bane would twist

Life from their members. Nor was found one sure

And universal principle of cure:

For what to one had given the power to take

The vital winds of air into his mouth,

And to gaze upward at the vaults of sky,

The same to others was their death and doom.

In those affairs, O awfullest of all,

O pitiable most was this, was this:

Whoso once saw himself in that disease

Entangled, ay, as damned unto death,

Would lie in wanhope, with a sullen heart,

Would, in fore-vision of his funeral,

Give up the ghost, O then and there. For, lo,

At no time did they cease one from another

To catch contagion of the greedy plague,—

As though but woolly flocks and horned herds;

And this in chief would heap the dead on dead:

For who forbore to look to their own sick,

O these (too eager of life, of death afeard)

Would then, soon after, slaughtering Neglect

Visit with vengeance of evil death and base—

Themselves deserted and forlorn of help.

But who had stayed at hand would perish there

By that contagion and the toil which then

A sense of honour and the pleading voice

Of weary watchers, mixed with voice of wail

Of dying folk, forced them to undergo.

This kind of death each nobler soul would meet.

The funerals, uncompanioned, forsaken,

Like rivals contended to be hurried through.

And men contending to ensepulchre

Pile upon pile the throng of their own dead:

And weary with woe and weeping wandered home;

And then the most would take to bed from grief.

Nor could be found not one, whom nor disease

Nor death, nor woe had not in those dread times

Attacked.

By now the shepherds and neatherds all,

Yea, even the sturdy guiders of curved ploughs,

Began to sicken, and their bodies would lie

Huddled within back-corners of their huts,

Delivered by squalor and disease to death.

O often and often couldst thou then have seen

On lifeless children lifeless parents prone,

Or offspring on their fathers', mothers' corpse

Yielding the life. And into the city poured

O not in least part from the countryside

That tribulation, which the peasantry

Sick, sick, brought thither, thronging from every quarter,

Plague-stricken mob. All places would they crowd,

All buildings too; whereby the more would death

Up-pile a-heap the folk so crammed in town.

Ah, many a body thirst had dragged and rolled

Along the highways there was lying strewn

Besides Silenus-headed water-fountains,—

The life-breath choked from that too dear desire

Of pleasant waters. Ah, everywhere along

The open places of the populace,

And along the highways, O thou mightest see

Of many a half-dead body the sagged limbs,

Rough with squalor, wrapped around with rags,

Perish from very nastiness, with naught

But skin upon the bones, well-nigh already

Buried—in ulcers vile and obscene filth.

All holy temples, too, of deities

Had Death becrammed with the carcasses;

And stood each fane of the Celestial Ones

Laden with stark cadavers everywhere—

Places which warders of the shrines had crowded

With many a guest. For now no longer men

Did mightily esteem the old Divine,

The worship of the gods: the woe at hand

Did over-master. Nor in the city then

Remained those rites of sepulture, with which

That pious folk had evermore been wont

To buried be. For it was wildered all

In wild alarms, and each and every one

With sullen sorrow would bury his own dead,

As present shift allowed. And sudden stress

And poverty to many an awful act

Impelled; and with a monstrous screaming they

Would, on the frames of alien funeral pyres,

Place their own kin, and thrust the torch beneath

Oft brawling with much bloodshed round about

Rather than quit dead bodies loved in life.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Gaius Julius Cæsar was born, according to the common account, in 100 B. C., but the real date is probably two years earlier. He was of patrician birth and his family claimed descent from Ascanius; or Iulus, the son of Æneas. Marius, his uncle by marriage, made him a priest of Jupiter at the age of not more than fifteen. While still little more than a boy he married Cornelia, the daughter of Cinna, and barely escaped the proscription of Sulla when he refused to divorce her. The young Cæsar was thus, in spite of his patrician birth, identified with the popular party. In 67 B. C. he was quæstor in Farther Spain, in 65 B. C. he became curule ædile, in which office he distinguished himself by the magnificence of his public games and exhibitions, and in 63 B. C. he was elected pontifex maximus, thereby becoming for life the official head of the Roman religion.

In 62 B. C. he was chosen prætor, and the next year was sent as proprætor to Farther Spain. Up to this time he was known chiefly as a dissolute man and an unscrupulous demagogue. His extravagance had involved him in debts amounting to more than a million dollars. But in the government of his province he distinguished himself by military successes and excellent civil administration, besides amassing sufficient wealth to pay his debts.

In 60 B. C. he returned to Rome, and soon formed with Pompey and Crassus the agreement known as the first triumvirate, by which he was assured of the consulship in 59 B. C., and the government of Gaul for the following five years. To strengthen the alliance he married his young and beautiful daughter Julia to Pompey. In 56 B. C. he met Pompey and Crassus at Lucca, in the presence of a great concourse of senators and their followers, and an agreement was made that Cæsar should continue to hold the province of Gaul through 49 B. C., while Pompey and Crassus were to be consuls in 55 B. C., after which Syria and Spain were to be given to Crassus and Pompey respectively for five years. The agreement was duly carried out, and in 54 B. C. Crassus want to Syria, where he lost his life after the battle of Carrhæ, in 53 B. C. In the same year Pompey’s wife, Julia, died. Pompey had not gone to Spain to take possession of his province, but remained at Rome, and soon became openly hostile to Cæsar. When the Gallic war was ended, the senatorial party, with Pompey at its head, demanded that Cæsar disband his army. This he refused to do unless Pompey also gave up his military command. Hereupon the civil war broke out, Cæsar crossed the Rubicon, the boundary of his province, and Pompey fled to Greece, where he was defeated in 48 B. C., at Pharsalus, then to Egypt, where he was murdered. In 46 B. C. the senatorial party was finally defeated in the battle of Thapsus, in Africa, and their leader, Cato, committed suicide at Utica.

Cæsar now returned to Rome, where he was made imperator and perpetual dictator, thus uniting in one person all the political power of the state. Henceforth the forms of republican government were but a thin mask disguising a real monarchy. In the brief period of his power Cæsar accomplished the reform of the calendar, and carried through numerous important changes for the improvement of the government, but nothing could placate the hatred of those who wished to restore the rule of the senate, whatever its abuses had been. On the Ides of March (March 15), 44 B. C., he was murdered in the senate-house by a band of conspirators headed by Brutus.