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y

SENECA

THE CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY
OF ENGLAND since the Acces-
sion of George III. 1760-1860.
By the Right Hon. Sir Thomas
Erskine May, K.C.B., D.C.L. (Lord
Farnborough). Edited and continued
to 191 1 by Francis Holland. 3 vols.
8vo.
Vols. I.-II., 1 760-1 860.

Vol. III., i860 -191 1. By Francis
Holland.

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

LONDON NEW YORK BOMBAY

CALCUTTA AND MADRAS

SENECA.

From the double bust of Seneca and Socrates in
the Berlin Museum.

SENECA

BY

FRANCIS HOLLAND

WITH FRONTISPIECE

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON

FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK
BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS

1920
All rights reserved

ava;lairis

, ^e ^^T\r\(pQ * .

PR

tic

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

This essay in biography was originally intended
as an introduction to a translation of Seneca's
letters, the greater part of which has been com-
pleted. But as this translation is not likely ever
to be published, I have decided, after long hesita-
tion, to print the introduction by itself, on the
chance that here or there some reader may be
found to share my interest in the subject.

Of the three branches into which philosophy,
in the ancient view, divided itself — ethic, physic,
and logic — it is with the two first alone that Seneca
was concerned. He never lost touch with life and
reality. To those who ' love to lose themselves in
a mystery,' and rest in an ' O Altitudo ! ' Seneca
as a philosopher makes no appeal. Rather would
he teach men how to find themselves and, so far
as is possible to souls closed in by a ' vesture of
decay,' to understand the meaning of life and of
death. His meaning is never ambiguous. How-
ever shallow a pool may be, as has often been
said, you cannot see to the bottom if the water
is muddy. Like the waters of the Lake of Garda,
on the other hand, Seneca's thoughts combine
clearness with depth. He played too large a part

vi INTRODUCTORY NOTE

in a critical period of history and of thought
to find time for the abstract speculations and
dialectical subtleties with which the logical
branch of philosophy was concerned, and in
which the Greek masters of the Stoic school
were mainly interested; and no doubt it is this
esprit positif which so commended him to his
great debtor, Montaigne.

I have added, 'to fill the page,' a paper on
Caius Maecenas, which appeared long ago in the
Dublin Review. I have to thank the editor for
the permission to republish, which has not been
refused.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

PAGE

Introductory Note v

I. Marcus Ajsj^eus^Sen^xla^ ANii__iiis_.SQNS:r-
The Controversiae — Helvia — The
Battle of the Books . . . , i

II. Early Years and Education — Sotion,

Attalus, Fabianus . . . . rs"

III. The Principate of Caligula, a.d. 37-42 . 24

IV. Exile in Corsica, a.d. 41-49 ... 32

V. Return from Exile — Last Years of

Claudius, a.d. 48-54 .... 46

VI. The Quinquennium Neronis, a.d. 54-59 . 57

VII. Seneca in Power 75

VIII, The Tragedy of Baiae, a.d. 59 . . .86

IX. Decline of Seneca's Influence — Death of

Burrhus and of Octavia ... 98

X. Seneca in Retirement — His Friends and

Occupations iiF

XI. Letter to Lucilius on Aetna — Seneca's

Riches and Apologia .... 136

XII. The Conspiracy of Piso and the Death of

Seneca 150

XIII. The Philosophy of Seneca . . 164

Caius Maecenas 187

vu

FRONTISPIECE

Seneca. — From the double bust of Seneca and Socrates in
the Berlin Museum.

{From tJic Volume on Petronius in the Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann)

SENECA

CHAPTER I

MARCUS ANNAEUS SENECA AND HIS SONS — THE
CONTROVERSIAE — HELVIA — THE BATTLE OF
THE BOOKS

A PLEASANT impression of the tranquil old age
of Marcus Annaeus Seneca, the father of the
philosopher, under the principate of Tiberius,
is given in the dedications to his three sons,
Novatus, Lucius Seneca, and Mela,^ which are pre-
fixed to his five books of Controversiae. These
Controversiae, which first came into fashion in
the time of Cicero,^ were imaginary cases argued
on one side and the other by the professors in
the schools of rhetoric for the instruction of their
pupils, or by the pupils in the presence and
under the direction of their masters. They turned
on disputable questions of ethics or law — a

1 ' Docti Senecae ter numeranda domus ' (Martial, iv. 40).

' Dialog, de Orat. 35. Before the age of Cicero general
questions were discussed in the schools as theses, in Cicero's
time these became causae, and were modelled on the actual cases
tried in the courts, and these in their turn were succeeded by
the controversiae, which came to hold, as the form through which
eloquence was taught, the chief place in the education of the
young Roman (Seneca, Controv. i. Pref.).

B

2 SENECA

non-existent rule of law being generally assumed
for the purpose of the pleadings — and the more
dramatic and improbable the circumstances
imagined by the rhetoricians, the more crowded
with pupils were their schools, and the greater
their consequent renown.^

In the great days of the republic, when the
sovereign power at Rome was vested ultimately
in the various assemblies of her citizens, the faculty
of swaying these assemblies by eloquence was
almost the one necessary qualification for a
successful career, yet it was not till the genera-
tion immediately preceding the establishment of
the Empire that the art of rhetoric was taught
systematically at Rome. Before that time a
youth who looked forward to a forensic career
would be introduced by his father to one of
the celebrated orators of the day, whose methods
he would study, whose pleadings he would never
fail to attend, and to whom he would render

1 Tyrants and pirates were favourite characters in these
declamations — tyrants who issue edicts ordering sons to execute
their fathers, pirates with lovely daughters who rescue and elope
with their father's prisoners. The art is to involve the actors
on either side in a conflict between equally sacred obligations.
In their beginnings, however, in the time recalled by the elder
Seneca, the controversiae were less extravagant and more nearly
related to reality. Thus in a controversy declaimed before the
Emperor Augustus with Agrippa and Maecenas in attendance,
in which Marcus Seneca's chief friend, Porcius Latro, was the
principal interlocutor, the case supposed relates to a father of
two sons, one of whom he had disinherited. The disinherited
son forms a connection with a woman who bears him a son.
On his death-bed he sends the woman to his father, and com-
mends to him his son. The father adopts the boy. The other
son disputes this arrangement, and pleads that his father is not
of sound mind or capable of making such a disposition. The
case is argued between them.

MARCUS ANNAEUS SENECA 3

what assistance he could.^ When rhetoric was
first studied in Rome as an art, and for the
training just described was substituted that of
the schools, the causae there discussed were
made to resemble as closely as possible the cases
of the forum — the one bearing to the other the
same sort of relation that the proceedings in
political debating societies bear to the debates
in the House of Commons. But after the fall
of the republic, when the orators who had
numbered kings and nations among their clients,
or had impeached proconsuls for the oppression
of provinces, were succeeded by the delatores, who
earned fame, indeed, and vast sums of money,
but also the detestation of all honest men by
bringing accusations against great senators whom
the emperors wished to destroy,^ the rhetorical
exercises of the schools became ever more and
more remote from reality. The object of teachers
and pupils alike was not to bring conviction
to the minds of their hearers, but to win ap-
plause for their own cleverness. Rhetoric ceased
to have an object outside itself — it became an
art for art's sake. The triumph of the contro-
versialists in these fantastic contests was the

1 The next step for an ambitious youth was the impeachment
of some great State offender. Thus Juhus Caesar in his twenty-
first year impeached Dolabella, and Asinius PolHo at about the
same age became famous by his prosecution of Cato.

* The State having become, as it were, personified in the
emperor, the prosecution of the victims of imperial tyranny
appeared to the prosecutors to be of the same nature as the
famous impeachments of republican times, and an orator such
as Memmius Regulus, while serving as the instrument of a
Domitian's cruelty, would regard himself as a Cicero accusing
Verres.

4 SENECA

invention of the effective aphorisms, antitheses,
or epigrams called sententiae, which were ap-
plauded for their pithiness or ingenuity, and
easily retained in the memory. * Knowledge is
the foundation of eloquence ' — ' rem tene, verba
sequentur/ wrote the elder Cato in the earliest
Roman treatise on oratory. The rhetoricians
of the schools seemed to reverse this maxim,
and to believe eloquence to be the foundation of
knowledge — so all-important a place did rhetoric
hold in the later Roman scheme of education,
and so remote from the real business of life
and of the forum had their rhetorical exercises
become. No one, as Tacitus wrote, in republican
times attained great power without the aid
of eloquence. Consequently, the attainment of
linguistic mastery of expression was the chief
aim of education, and so continued to be after the
establishment of the Empire. In the grammatical
course, which preceded that of rhetoric, boys were
trained through the medium of classical poetry.

Marcus Annaeus Seneca is himself generally
described in modern books as a rhetorician ;
but although he was intimate with the greatest
masters of the art, attended their lectures and
declamations with assiduity, and treasured their
sententiae in his memory, there is no direct
evidence that he himself ever taught in the
schools. He came to Rome from his native
Corduba in Spain as soon as the close of the
civil wars allowed him to leave that colony,
afterwards regretting that he had not been
able to come sooner, since then he might have

MARCUS ANNAEUS SENECA 5

heard the living voice of Cicero — an epithet
commonly used, he adds, but to the voice of
Cicero really applicable.*

His collection of Controversiae was made at
the request of his sons who, anxious to know
something of the character and style of the
famous rhetors of the preceding generation,
begged their father to tell them all he could
remember on the subject. His memory had
been famous in the days of his youth; and we
cannot wonder that it was esteemed a prodigy
if we may believe his assurance that he was
then able to repeat without an error two thousand
names in the right order after a single hearing.
But in his old age, he adds, it had become
capricious ; he could no longer count on its ready
and immediate obedience to his will, but was
obliged to wait its pleasure. For the events of
his youth it was as strong as ever, but it could
not retain what was in later years entrusted to
its keeping ; just as in a vessel already filled to
which more water is added what is on the surface
overflows and is lost, but what is below remains.
He applauds the desire of his sons to learn

1 Cicero, after Julius Caesar's final victories had silenced his
voice in the forum, amused himself by giving lessons in declama-
tion to Hirtius and Dolabella — two of the most distinguished of
Caesar's officers — on their return from the war. These great
pupils of his — ' grandes praetextatos ' he calls them — were at
that time compensating themselves for the fatigues of their
campaigns by a life of pleasure at Rome. ' They were my
masters,' said Cicero, ' in the art of dining, as I was theirs in the
art of speaking ' (Cicero, Ep. ix. i6 ; Suet, de clans Rhet.). This
was in the year 46 B.C. If Marcus Seneca was fifteen or sixteen
years of age at the time, he would have been born about the year
61 B.C. (Sen. Controv. i. Pref.).

6 SENECA

something of the eloquence of the past generation
— in the first place, because the more numerous
and various the models before them the less are
they likely to become mere imitators ; and, in
the second place, because the age is degenerate,
and because the art of rhetoric having reached
its height about the time of Cicero had, accord-
ing to the universal law of change, been de-
clining ever since. In the days of freedom, so
he continues, rhetorical exercises had a serious
object, since by eloquence a man might reach
the highest offices of the State ; but, since the
overthrow of the republic, this spur to effort
had largely been withdrawn. He had heard all
the great orators except Cicero, and the task
of satisfying the praiseworthy curiosity of his
sons by returning as it were to school in his old
age, and bringing to light out of the caverns of
his memory all that they contained of the decla-
mations made in the schools by the celebrated
rhetoricians of the past, would be to him a de-
lightful labour. The publication of their witty
sayings and ingenious subtleties would also in-
cidentally have the useful effect of checking the
unacknowledged plagiarisms of their degenerate
successors.

The elder Seneca was a Roman of the old
school, of equestrian rank, a lover of the past —
orderly, austere, and methodical. His wife, Helvia ,
belonged to an influential provincial family,
in which a severe simplicity was a tradition.^

* ' Bene in antiqua et severa institutam domo ' {Cons, ad
Helv. xvi.).

MARCUS ANNAEUS SENECA 7

Like most mothers of distinguished men she
was, if we may accept the description left
of her by her son the philosopher, a woman
of remarkable character and intelligence. Her
husband, to whom any departure from old
Roman customs and ideas was distasteful,^ was
opposed to what we now call the higher educa-
tion of women, and would not suffer her to devote
much time to study, a circumstance regretted
by her son, in whose judgment there were few
on whom such opportunities would have been
less likely to be wasted, or who in the little time
actually allowed could have acquired so much.
He tells us that his mother took deep interest
in his philosophical studies, while her delight
in his society was inexhaustible ; and, on the
other hand, that the very sight of her always
filled him with an almost boyish gaiety and
gladness. After her widowhood, which succeeded
within thirty days the death of the kindest of
brothers, she administered with the utmost care
and disinterestedness the inheritance of her three
sons ; refusing all personal advantage from it as
if it had been another's, and giving as much care
to its management as if it had been her own.
In the same way the course of honours which
two of her sons successfully pursued, and the
fortunes they acquired, though giving her pleasure
for their sake, were a source not of profit to
herself, but of additional expense — so much
better did she deem it to give than to receive.
Novatus, the eldest of the three sons of Marcus

^ ' Nimis majorum consuetudini deditus ' {Cons, ad Helv. xvi.).

8 SENECA

Seneca and Helvia, was adopted by his father's
friend, Junius GalUo the rhetorician, by whose
name he became known. He entered early on
an official career, passing through all the official
dignities till he became consul suffedus, after
which he became Proconsul of Achaia in the year
52, where the accident of a riot, resulting in the
appearance of Paul of Tarsus before his tribunal,
immortalised a name which all the praises of
his brother Seneca, who describes him as the
most irresistibly charming man of his age, could
not have rescued from oblivion.^ If we may
trust his brother's description, he was indeed
a man made to be loved. 'No one man,' writes
the younger Seneca, with his usual rhetorical
exaggeration, ' is so agreeable to another as Gallic
to all who know him ' — ' nemo enim mortalium

1 The identity of the Gallio of the Acts with GalHo the brother
of Seneca is made practically certain by an incidental reference
to his brother in Achaia in one of the philosopher's letters to
Lucilius : ' Illud mihi in ore erat domini met Gallionis, qui cum
in Achaia febrem habere caepisset, protinus navem adscendit, clami-
tans non corporis esse, sed loci morbum' {Ep. civ.). Achaia, which
comprised all the Peloponnesus and the greater part of Hellas
proper with the islands, had been an imperial province under
Tiberius and Caligula, but was transferred to the Senate by
Claudius in a.d. 44 (Tac. Ann. i. 76; Suet. Claudius, 25). The
date of Gallio's proconsulship (52) has been ascertained by the
discovery of an inscription at Delphi containing four fragments
of a letter of Claudius to the city. Pliny alludes to a voyage
made by Gallio for the sake of his health, which may be the
same as that spoken of by Seneca : ' Praeterea est alius usus multi-
plex, principalis vera navigandi phthisi a^ectis, ut diximus, aut san-
guinem egerentibus : sicut proxime Anneum Gallionem fecisse post
Consulatum meminimus' (Plin. N.H. xxxi. 6). Seneca had been
recalled from exile in 49, and his brother Gallio must have been
consul suffectus in 50 or 51. It was the custom of the emperors
at that time to nominate consuls for short periods, though the
year was named only after those first appointed.

MARCUS ANNAEUS SENECA 9

uni tarn dulcis est quam hie omnibus.' ^ ' His
courtesy and unstudied charm of manner win
every heart, yet so modest is he that not only
does he shrink from the very approaches of
flattery, but listens with equal reluctance to the
praises which his numerous excellences have
really deserved.' ^

The youngest brother Mela, to whom the
second book of ' Controversies ' is exclusively
addressed, though described by his father as
mentally the best endowed of the three, made
an early resolution to content himself with his
hereditary rank and, leaving the career of honours
to his two accomplished brothers, to devote
himself to a life of studious retirement. His
father, though he did not conceal his own prefer-
ence for an active career, acquiesced without
much difficulty in this decision, declaring that
he was ready, when his two elder sons had put
out to sea, to keep the third in harbour. That
Mela was his favourite son, and that this lack
of ambition was a disappointment to one so
enamoured of traditionary ways as the elder
Seneca, will seem probable to the reader of the
dedication addressed to him; nor would he have
been greatly consoled had he been able to fore-
see that this contempt for the ancient State
dignities would not prevent his son from accumu-
lating a large fortune as procurator of the imperial
demesne under the principate of Nero.

1 Cf . Statius, Sylv. ii. 7 : ' Hoc plus quam Senecam dedisse
mundo, Aut dulcem generasse Gallionem.'

2 Nat. Quaest. iv. Praef.

10 SENECA

The Senecas appear to have been a most
united family. But whereas the father held
the view common to old men in every age that
the era of great men was over, and that in
the new generation there was an unexampled
dearth of talent and ability in every kind, the
sons were believers in progress, with scant
respect for authority, tradition, or national
feeling.

The reminiscences of the Controversiae in
which the father endeavours to convince his
sons by description and quotation of the
superiority of the past generation, were the
outcome of this difference of view. In the
preface of the last book he declares that they
shall trouble him no longer. He owns he is
weary of the subject. At first he thought it
would be pleasant to summon up remembrance
of things past and recall the best years of his
life under the mild Augustus, but he now feels
half ashamed, as if he attached too much import-
ance to such studies. These exercises of ingenuity,
he says, are well enough if taken lightly : take
them too seriously and they disgust. He could
not admire the modern rhetorician Musa, whom
his sons had insisted on his accompanying them
to hear. He thinks his style turgid and un-
natural, declares the man has no sincerity, and,
in spite of Mela's frowning disapproval — ' licet
Mela mens confrahat frontem ' — gives instances
of what he means from the declamation he had
heard. Clearly between father and sons, in
spite of high mutual affection and respect, no

MARCUS ANNAEUS SENECA ii

agreement on these points was reached or
possible.

The positions of the various controversialists
in the ' battle of the books,' fought in the second
half of the first century between the upholders
of the classical tradition in writing and speaking
and the new school, between ancient and modern
ideas and standards, are admirably given in the
dialogue De Oratorihus, generally ascribed to
Tacitus. The dialogue is for all time a model of
urbane controversy, in which the most complete
difference of opinion is effectively expressed with-
out a trace of acerbity or sarcasm. The views
of the author are probably represented by the
gentle Maternus, who, after Afer and Messala
have pleaded the cause of the moderns and of
the ancients respectively, takes a middle course.
He admits with Messala the fact of the decay of
eloquence, but argues that this is the result of
the change in the character of the times and in
the nature of the government rather than of any
decline in the abilities of men. Augustus, in-
deed, together with everything else, had pacified
eloquence which could only flourish in turbulent
times ; but he suggests that eloquence was not
of such importance that it was desirable that
the times should be turbulent in order that it
might flourish. He might have added that good
art being the true representation of emotion,
passion, or thought, which the artist has himself
experienced either actually or through sympathy,
it must change with the changing life of the
day and cannot be limited by old conventions.

12 SENECA

Original minds may not force their ideas into an
ancient mould on pain of illustrating the couplet
of Boileau :

'Voulant se redresser soi-meme on s'estropie,
Et d'un original devient une copie.'

When, however, we compare the graceful, easy-
flowing style of Livy, Cicero, and Virgil, their
avoidance of over-emphasis or abrupt transi-
tions, the rise and fall of their periods, and
the even texture of their narrative, compar-
able to a good mountain road, which is never
irksome to a traveller whatever the height to
which it rises — when we compare this with the
bold realism, the disregard for convention and
tradition, the cosmopolitanism, and the striking
but often isolated thoughts and aphorisms of
Lucan and Tacitus and Juvenal, we can under-
stand the extreme dislike which such admirers
of antiquity in later generations as Quintilian
or Aulus Gellius or Pronto felt for the younger
Seneca, whom they rightly regarded as the
chief author of this revolution in taste. The
transition resembles, both in its nature and in
the circumstance of the intervening revolution,
that from the French encyclopaedists of the
eighteenth century to Chateaubriand and Victor
Hugo — a transition deplored by Sainte-Beuve,
who might be called the Quintilian of the nine-
teenth century.

CHAPTER II

EARLY YEARS AND EDUCATION — SOTION,
ATTALUS, FABIANUS

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the second son of
Marcus Seneca and Helvia, was born at Corduba
about the commencement of the Christian era.^
He was living at Rome, as we have seen, with
his parents and brothers in the days of Tiberius,
and while still a boy was seized with a passion
for those philosophical studies which were to
be the chief interest of his life and his best title
to fame. His earliest master in philosophy was
Sotion, a native of Alexandria, under whose
influence he ' thought nobly ' for a time of the
doctrines of Pythagoras.

Sotion showed us [he afterwards wrote in a letter to
Lucilius ^] ' the reasons of Pythagoras and afterwards of
Sextius for abstaining from meat — reasons differing from

1 ' Quae Tritonide fertiles Athenas

Unctis, Baetica, provocas trapetis,

Lucanum potes imputare terris.

Hoc plus quam Senecam dedisse mundo,

Aut dulcem generasse Gallionem.'

(Statius, Sylv. ii. 7.)
* Ep. cviii.

14 SENECA

one another yet in each case of a high nature. Sextius
maintained that man could find food enough in the
world without shedding blood, and that the association
of the satisfaction of his appetites with the slaughter
of beasts was a cause of cruelty. He thought, too, that
it was wise to circumscribe as much as possible the raw
material of luxury, and, moreover, that a vegetarian
diet was best for the health. But Pythagoras beUeved
in the common nature and the inter-communion of all
things. Nothing, he thought, that has Ufe can perish;
but all things must suffer change and pass in never-
ending succession from one form into another. We
cannot tell after how many vicissitudes and how many
dwelling-places a soul will return into the form of man,
but we run the risk of committing murder or even parri-
cide when we slay or devour an animal in which some
soul we have known in human shape may be abiding.
When Sotion had expounded to us these doctrines of
Pythagoras, he would ask us whether we believed that
lives passed from one body to another, that what we
called death was but transmigration, that the souls of
men might inhabit flocks or wild beasts or fishes, that
nothing perished in the universe but only changed its
place, and that men and animals no less than the heavenly
bodies go their appointed rounds and know the same
vicissitudes ? ' Great men,' he would add, ' have believed
these things, but I do not wish to fetter your judgment
concerning them. Yet if they be true you are right to
abstain from meat, and if false what harm can you suffer
from such abstention ? It is at least a useful economy,'
Moved by these considerations I eat no meat for a
whole year, and after a very short time found this
regimen not only easy but agreeable. My mind
seemed lighter and more agile — to this day I cannot
affirm with certainty whether it really was so or not.
You will wonder why I abandoned this diet. I will
explain to you why. My youth was passed under the
principate of Tiberius, at a time when foreign rites

EARLY YEARS AND EDUCATION 15

were prohibited in Rome.^ Abstention from the flesh
of certain animals was held to be evidence of an in-
chnation towards the Jewish superstition, and there-
fore at the request of my father, who was no enemy
to philosophy but feared a scandal, I returned to my
former habits, and he found no difficulty in persuading
me to eat better dinners.^

From Sotion the Pythagorean, the young
Seneca passed to the lecture-room of Attains
the Stoic, whose influence upon his life and
ideas was of a more decisive character. Attains
is described by the elder Seneca as by far the
acutest and most eloquent philosopher of his
time — * magnae vir eloquentiae, ex philosophis,
quos nostra aetas vidit, longe et subtilissimus et
facundissimus.' ^ We know nothing of his life,
except that, having been cheated of his property
by Sejanus, he consoled himself as a philosopher
should by following the plough ; but we know
something of his mind by the many references to
him and quotations from his sayings to be found
in the works of his admiring pupil, Lucius Seneca.

1 This edict was issued in the year 19 : ' Actum et de sacris
aegyptiis judaicisque pellendis : factumque patrum consultum,
" ut quatuor millia Hbertini generis, ea superstitione infecta,
quis idonea aetas, in insulam Sardinian! veherentur . . . ceteri
cederent Italia, nisi certam ante diem profanos ritus exuissent " '
(Tac. Ann. ii. 85).

2 Ep. cviii. The old reading was : ' Patre itaque me rogante,
qui non calumniam timebat, sed phUosophiam oderat, ad
pristinam consuetudinem redii,' but it is probable that the
suggested emendation of Lipsius is correct, since we may infer
from the decorous conservatism manifest in the writings of the
elder Seneca that he was unlikely to be indifferent to scandal,
and from his words to Mela — ' non sum bonae mentis impedi-
mentum ' — that his attitude to philosophy was at least tolerant.

^ Suas. ii.

i6 SENECA

The young enthusiast besieged, so he tells us, the
door of Attains' classroom ; he was always the
first to enter when it was opened, and the last
to leave. Nor was this all. Attains was a
man of easy access, most friendly disposed
towards his pupils, whose ingenuous advances
he was ever ready to meet more than half-way.
The young Seneca would walk with him and
draw him into discussion on subjects of perennial
interest. It was Attalus, he tells us, who taught
him to distinguish between reality and appear-
ances, between the eloquence of truth and that
of display, between intrinsic beauty and the empty
sound of swelling words. He would pour con-
tempt alike on luxury and on avarice ; he would
extol a chaste body, a sober table, a mind purified
not only from unlawful but even from superfluous
pleasures. He told his pupils that those who
came to a philosopher's lectures merely as an
agreeable way of passing the time, to hear and
not to learn, to listen to eloquent phrases and
ingenious conceits, without any intention of
shaping anew the conduct of their life, would
derive no profit from philosophy.

However transitory [Seneca afterwards wrote] might
be on many the effect of such exhortations, yet the
minds of the young being tender and impressionable,
if the master is sincere and solely occupied with the
good of his pupils his words will have lasting effects.
At all events [he adds] this was true in my case. My
admiration for him was boundless, and when I heard
him speak of the faults, the errors, and the evils of life,
I often was moved with compassion for mankind, and
he seemed to me more than human.

EARLY YEARS AND EDUCATION 17

Under the influence of this teaching Seneca
for a time lived a life of asceticism according
to the strictest rule of the Stoics and, though it
was not long before he reverted to a more ordinary
way of life, there were some habits then contracted
and some abstinences then resolved upon which
he never abandoned. In the letter already quoted,
written to Lucilius near the end of his life, after
describing the teaching of Attains and his own
youthful enthusiasm, he adds :

Something of all this remained with me, Lucilius.
After the great original impulse had spent its force, I
persevered in some fragments of that high enterprise.
Thus I have abstained throughout my life from such
delicacies as oysters and mushrooms. They are not food,
but condiments, meant to stimulate a jaded appetite,
and the delight of the gluttonous because they are easily
swallowed and easily vomited. So, too, from that time
onward I have never used ointment, believing that the
best odour for the body is the absence of odour ; never
touched wine ; and always avoided hot-air baths. To
boil down the body and exhaust it by sweating always
seemed to me a luxurious superfluity. From other
renunciations I desisted ; but I returned to what I had
abandoned with a moderation that came much nearer
to abstinence than self-indulgence — a moderation per-
haps even more difficult in practice than total absten-
tion, for certainly it is often easier to abandon a habit
altogether than to keep it within modest bounds.^

Another of Seneca's habits, dating probably
from this time, which ought to win him some
sympathy from Englishmen, was the daily cold

1 Ep. 108.

i8 SENECA

bath all the year round, for which, as in one of
his letters he tells us, he became known :

I, that famous cold-bather (Psychrolutes), who, on
the first of January, used to disport myself in the
moat ; who used to celebrate the coming of the new year
by leaping into the water brought down from the hills,
j ust as others would celebrate it by some auspicious words
spoken read or written, first transferred my camp to
the Tiber, and lastly to this tub of mine which, when
I am feeling my strongest and acting in perfect good
faith -with myself, is heated only by the sun.^

Another master, whose memory was ever
honoured by Seneca, and by whom at this time
he was instructed, was the learned author Papirius
Fabianus, an old friend of his father. Fabianus
had acquired an early reputation as a rhetorician,
having studied rhetoric under Blandus — the first
man of equestrian rank to teach that art in Rome.^

The elder Seneca describes his style in decla-
mation as easy fluent and rapid, but lacking in
vigour and incisiveness. He had succeeded so
well, he tells us, in banishing such passions as
anger or grief from his own breast that he had
lost the power of representing them ; and this in a
rhetorician was a defect. But his critic had not
long the opportunity of hearing him, for Fabianus
soon transferred his allegiance from rhetoric to
philosophy and natural science, and it was as a

1 Ep. 83.

* Until that time the teaching of rhetoric had been confined
to freedmen. The elder Seneca, in stating this, expresses his
wonder that it should at any time have been considered dis-
honouring to teach what by universal admission it was honourable
to learn.

EARLY YEARS AND EDUCATION 19

philosopher that he contributed to the education
of the younger Seneca.^

Fabianus was a copious author. His works are
frequently cited by Pliny in the Natural History,
and Lucius Seneca says of his philosophical
writings that they were surpassed only by those
of Cicero, Pollio, and Livy. He wrote in a level
style and with a certain carelessness of diction
that seemed to prove him more occupied with
his matter than his manner. 'Too much atten-
tion to style,' replied Seneca to his correspondent
Lucilius who had read on his recommendation a
book of Fabianus and been much disappointed,
' does not become a philosopher who should be
thinking of more important matters. How can
a man defy fortune if he is nervous about words ?
Had you heard him, as I did, your admiration
for the whole would have left you no leisure to
criticise the parts. What though the calm progress
of his discourse was interspersed by no sudden and
striking reflections {" suhiti ictus sententiarum"),
the very evenness of its flow had a charm of its own.
There was nothing laboured about his eloquence ;
it accompanied him like a shadow without any
effort on his part. You could see that he felt
what he said or wrote ; that his object was to
show you what he admired and not to excite your
admiration for himself. He was not slovenly

1 Even after he had formally abandoned rhetoric for
philosophy he continued to study eloquence as a means, though
no longer as an end — his example in this respect being held up
for imitation by Marcus Seneca to his son Mela whom he
endeavoured to convince of the importance of eloquence what-
ever way of life he might see fit to adopt.

20 SENECA

in his use of words, but unconcerned ; his sole
interest was the profit of his hearers/ Seneca
ends his description by adding that Fabianus'
lectures were admirably calculated to elevate the
mind of a well-disposed youth and to spur him
on to imitate so excellent an example, without
causing him to despair of success.^

Such were the instructors of the young Seneca
under the principate of Tiberius. His health
throughout life was delicate. While still young
he was brought to great misery by an affection
of the lungs, which he calls suspirium.^

Wasted to a shadow [he afterwards wrote], I was
often tempted to cut short my life, but the old age of
the kindest of fathers still held me back. I reflected
that I ought to consider not so much with what fortitude
I could die, but how impossible it was that he could
bear my loss with fortitude. Therefore I bade myself
live ; for there are times when it is a mark of courage even
to live. I will tell you what were then my consolations,
observing first that these were also the most useful of medi-
cines, for certain it is that whatever elevates the soul does
good to the body. My studies saved me. It was to
Philosophy that I owed the power to rise from my bed
and the recovery of my health — and this is the least
of my obligations to her. My friends watched with me :
their encouragements and their conversation contributed
much to my restoration. There is nothing, my dearest
Lucilius, like the affection of friends to assist and renew
a sick man ; nothing that so certainly beguiles us from
the expectation and the fear of death. ^

1 Ep. loo.

^ ' Satis enim apte dici suspirium potest. Brevis autem valde,
et procellae similis, impetus est : intra horam fere desinit' {Ep. liv.),
» Ep. 78.

EARLY YEARS AND EDUCATION 21

Through several of his illnesses, and probably
through this one, Seneca was nursed by his
aunt — a half-sister of Helvia and the widow of
Vetrasius Pollio, for sixteen years governor of
Egypt under Tiberius. ^ It was she who had
brought him as a child from Spain to Rome;
and he regarded her with especial admiration
and respect. He relates in her honour an
incident of which he was himself a witness.
Her husband died at sea ; there was a storm ;
the ship's tackle was destroyed and the ship in
great danger ; the only thought of the widow
was for her husband's body from which no
danger could separate her and which she
succeeded in saving. At a later date, though
naturally modest and retiring with a dislike of
publicity of any kind that stood out in strong
contrast to the general tone of the fashionable
women of her time, she exerted all her influence
to obtain for her nephew the quaestorship and
became, as he wrote to his mother, ambitious
for his sake.^

Towards the end of the principate of Tiberius,
Lucius Seneca, at the desire of his father,
abandoned for a time the schools of philosophy
and practised with success at the Bar, This
was the usual beginning for those who were
ambitious to succeed in an official career and to
raise themselves through the various ascending

1 It was the custom of Tiberius to continue in their civil
and military governments and offices for long periods of years,
and sometimes for life, those whom he thought worthy of his
confidence.

* Consol. ad Helviam,

22 SENECA

magistracies to senatorial rank and the govern-
ment of provinces.

Your brothers [the elder Seneca wrote to Mela] are
ambitious ; and are preparing themselves for a career
in the forum and in office in which even success has its
dangers. Time was when I myself longed for and
applauded such a career ; and, dangerous though it be,
I have urged your brothers to pursue it, so far at least
as they can do so within the strictest limits of honour.^

That the temptations to overstep these limits
in the closing years of Tiberius were numerous
may be inferred from the short description left
us by Seneca of the time — a description by a
disinterested eye-witness with no anti-imperial
prejudices which the defenders of that emperor
find it more difficult to explain away than the
invectives of later writers.

Under Tiberius [he wrote] there grew up a frenzied
passion for bringing accusations which increased till it
became almost universal and proved more destructive
to citizens than any civil war. Words spoken by men
when drunk and the most harmless pleasantries were
denounced. There was safety nowhere ; any pretext
was good enough to serve for an information. Nor,
after a time, did the accused think it worth while to
await the result of their trials, for this was always the
same.^

There had never been a public prosecutor
in Rome ; it had been of old the duty of citizens
to keep watch over one another in the interests
of the republic ; and for the republic was after-

* Seneca, Controv. ii. Praef.
'^ De Benef. iii. i6.

EARLY YEARS AND EDUCATION 23

wards substituted the emperor. To bring a
charge under the law of majestas, in the presumed
interest of the emperor, had become the quickest
road to forensic distinction and a fortune. It is
to the credit of Seneca that, unhke SiHus Italicus
and many others, he remembered his father's
proviso with regard to honour and was innocent
of this kind of impeachment.

CHAPTER III

THE PRINCIPATE OF CALIGULA, A.D. 37-42

We know little of the life of Seneca during the
closing years of Tiberius and the principate of
Caligula. Tiberius died in 37, and the elder
Seneca at a great age some years earlier, prob-
ably in Spain, as his three sons were absent
from his death-bed ^ and we know that his
widow administered with care and sagacity their
rich inheritance. Writing in the first year of
Claudius, the younger Seneca speaks of the
money reputation and honours lavishly bestowed
on him by fortune of which exile had deprived
him and of the public honours earned by
the industry of his brother Gallio. For these
distinctions the philosophical Mela had scorned
to compete ; but he too is spoken of as wealthy. ^
Seneca was married and the father of a boy,
whom he thus described to his mother :

1 ' Carissimum virum, ex quo mater trium libeforura eras,
extulisti, Lugenti tibi luctus nuntiatus est, omnibus quidem
absentibus liberis ; quasi de industria in id tempusconjectis malis
tuis ut nihil esset ubi se dolor tuus reclinaret ' {Consol. ad Helv. ii.) .
Lucius Seneca wrote a biography of his father with the title
De Vita Patris. Of this only the fragment of a sentence remains.

» His son Lucan was born in the year 39 at Corduba and
brought to Rome in 40 when seven months old. The author of
the ancient life of Lucan who tells us this says also that Mela
was known at Rome through his brother Seneca, ' a man famous
for every virtue,' and through his love of a quiet life (' propter
studium vitae guietioris ').

THE PRINCIPATE OF CALIGULA 25

Marcus, the most winning of children, in whose
presence sadness cannot endure. What breast so heavy-
laden that his embrace cannot lighten ? What wound
so fresh that his kisses cannot soothe ? What tears
can resist his gaiety ? What mind so oppressed by
care that his nonsense cannot relax ? Who can help
laughing at his pranks ? What brooding meditation so
concentrated and absorbed that his deHghtful chatter
cannot interrupt and turn the brooder himself into
a fellow-chatterbox ? I pray the gods that he may
survive me.-^

Gallic, too, had married and was a widower.
Kis daughter Novatilla was regarded by Seneca
almost as a child of his own and lived as much
with him as with his brother.

No work of Seneca published before the
death of Caligula has come down to us, but
that his publications before that date were
numerous and successful we know from a refer-
ence of Suetonius, who speaks of him as then
at the height of his popularity — ' turn maxime
placentem.' His earlier books must have con-
tained the bulk of the poetry dialogues and
speeches mentioned by Quintilian.^ Connected
with the official class through his mother's
family, witty, accomplished, original, and of
gentle and conciliating manners, he appealed
to the new generation by his daring innovations
in manner and disregard for old conventions, by
the freedom of his criticisms of the great orators
and poets of the past, and by the singular
power in which he was afterwards only ex-
celled by Tacitus, of enshrining striking thoughts

* Cons, ad Helv. xvi. ^ Inst. Oral. x. i.

26 SENECA

in short sentences that fixed themselves in the
memory by their precision and completeness.

Caligula who, vain about everything, was
especially vain of his oratorical powers, affected
to despise the style of Seneca which he described
in an oft-quoted phrase as ' sand without lime/ ^
The tyrant really possessed some genuine talent
for invective — when angry his words came
readily, he moved restlessly from place to place
as he spoke, and his loud voice could be heard
from a distance. He had also much skill in
persuasion, and in his saner moments a winning
manner that was almost irresistible.^ It was
his custom to make speeches before the Senate at
the trials of great offenders, on which occasions
the equestrian order was summoned by proclama-
tion to attend the sittings, and the fate of the
prisoner was often decided by the opportunities
which an attack on the one hand or a defence
on the other respectively offered to the imperial
rhetoric.^

The ornamental manner of Seneca, studded
with detached epigrams, contrasted strongly with
the torrential eloquence of the emperor and on
one occasion nearly cost him his life. He had
spoken in the Senate in the emperor's presence
with such eloquence and success that Caligula's
jealousy was aroused, and the orator would have
paid the extreme penalty for his triumph had not
one of the imperial mistresses persuaded her lover
that Seneca was in a rapid consumption and must

* ' Arenam sine calce ' (Suet., Cal. 53).

* Joseplius, Ant. xix. 2. ^ Suet., Cal. 53.

THE PRINCIPATE OF CALIGULA 27

shortly die in any case.^ It was doubtless to this
escape that he alluded when he wrote long after-
wards to Lucilius that a disease, seemingly mortal
had prolonged the lives and proved the salva-
tion of many men.^ Whether from this alarm, or
from the state of his health, or because after the
death of his father he felt more at liberty to
follow his own inclinations, Seneca at this time
ceased to plead causes and devoted himself to
literature and philosophy. Through his quaestor-
ship he was a member of the Senate, where he
must have been present at the remarkable scenes
which followed the assassination of Caligula
and may have shared in the brief dream of a
restoration of their old supremacy from which
the senators were so rudely awakened by the
soldiers and the populace.

Scattered about in Seneca's works are stories
of the emperor whom he declared that Nature
could only have produced to show what the
greatest vices could effect when found in the
highest station; and they are interesting as the
only accounts of the tyrant, except that of Philo
Judaeus, which we have from an eye-witness.

Though one of the chief amusements of Caligula
was to hold up to ridicule the bodily imperfections
of others, his own appearance, Seneca tells us, in
his last years was itself well adapted to mockery.
He was bald, with stray hairs drawn down over
his forehead to conceal his baldness ; his livid

^ Dion, lix. ig.

* Ep. 78. ' Multorum mortem distulit morbus ; et saluti illis
fuit videri perire.'

28 SENECA

complexion bore witness to the disorder of his mind ;
he had the wrinkled brow of an old woman, and
deep set under it wild and ferocious eyes. His
neck was hairy, his legs slender, and his feet
enormous.^

This description, overcharged perhaps at any
time, can only have been applicable to Caligula
as he was when the illness which destroyed his
mind had in its effects led him to those shameful
physical excesses and yet more shameful cruelties
and extravagances which degraded the last two
years of his principate. It cannot have been true
of the young Caius during the first months of his
reign, adored throughout the Empire, courteous,
generous, eloquent, and charming as he then
appeared while, with ' Youth on the prow and
Pleasure at the helm,' the ship of State rode
proudly along after the gloomy closing years of
Tiberius.

Nothing [wrote Philo of that time] was to be seen
throughout our cities but altars and sacrifices, priests
clad in white and garlanded, the joyous ministers of the
general mirth, festivals and assemblies, musical contests
and horse-races, wakes by day and night, amusements,
recreations, pleasures of every kind and addressed to
every sense.

For the Roman aristocracy this halcyon period
came to an end with the recovery of Caius from
his illness,^ for the exigencies of his luxury and
his megalomania having exhausted his treasury, a

^ De Constant. Sapientis, i8. Cp. Suet., Cal. 50.
2 "With the people the emperor, hke Nero, seems to have re-
tained popularity to the end (Josephus, Ant. Jud. xix. i. 20, ii. 5).

THE PRINCIPATE OF CALIGULA 29

veritable reign of terror began in order to supply
it from the spoils of rich victims, and increased
in intensity as the consciousness of guilt made
him suspect the designs of every man of note or
honesty. We are reminded o'f the death of Sir
Thomas More by Seneca's account of the serene
last hours of Julius Canus — one of the senators
who was put to death.

Canus Julius [he writes], a man of such commanding
greatness that his glory could not be obscured even
by the envy that always attaches to contemporaries,
was leaving the presence after a long altercation with
Caligula. * I may as well tell you,' said the tyrant
by way of final rejoinder, ' so that you may not flatter
yourself with false hopes, that I have given orders for
your execution.' ' I thank you, most excellent prince,'
replied Canus. . . . He passed the ten days' interval
between sentence and execution with a mind free from
any kind of anxiety — indeed, the perfect tranquillity dis-
played in his words and actions almost passes belief.
He was playing at draughts when summoned by the
centurion in charge of the prisoners destined to die that
day. He counted his pieces, and said to the other player,
* Look, I have most left. Now you are not after my
death to pretend you have won.' And turning to the
centurion, ' I call you to witness,' he said, ' that I
am a piece to the good.' His friends were lamenting ;
grieved at losing such a man. ' Why so sad ? ' he said.
' You will go on discussing whether the soul is immortal ;
but I shall know in a few minutes.' His search for
truth persisted to the very end ; and death itself afforded
him a new subject for investigation. He was accom-
panied by a philosopher and already stood near to the
altar on which the daily sacrifice was offered to our
god CaHgula. What were the subjects of his thoughts ?
He declared his intention in that last rapid moment

30 SENECA

carefully to observe whether the soul is conscious of its
flight ; and he promised, if he discovered anything, to
return and tell his friends where and what were the
souls of the departed.^

It was impossible, as Seneca observed, to prac-
tise philosophy longer ; and this tranquillity in the
midst of tempests argued a soul vi^orthy of eternity.

To pity the fates of such men as Canus, Socrates,
or Sir Thomas More w^ould be to misunderstand
them. But the emperor's freakish cruelty could
not always be so thwarted ; and another incident
related by Seneca is probably more characteristic
of the time than that just recorded. There was
a rich knight called Pastor whose son, having
offended Caligula by the luxuriance of his hair
and the elegance of his apparel, had been thrown
into prison. Pastor came to the emperor to beg
for his son's release; whereupon Caligula, as
if suddenly reminded of something he had for-
gotten, ordered the youth to instant execution.
The same day he invited the father to a banquet
of one hundred covers ; and instructed a spy to
observe his looks and conduct. Pastor came,
showing no discomposure in his countenance.
The feast was splendid, and the emperor drank
to his health, plied him with wine, sent him
ointments and garlands, treated him with especial
courtesy, and bade him drown his cares in wine
and good-fellowship. Pastor, a gouty old man,
showed no sign of distress. He anointed himself
with the oil, crowned himself with the garlands,
and drank more than would have become him

1 De Tranquill. Animi, c. 14.

THE PRINCIPATE OF CALIGULA 31

had he been celebrating his son's birthday instead
of his funeral. Why did he act thus when sick
to death at heart ? He had another son.^

After Caligula, paying the penalty of his
misdeeds, had died by the hand of a military
tribune named Cassius Chaerea whom jeering
personal insults had goaded into action, his uncle
Claudius was discovered by a soldier hiding behind
a curtain in a dark corner of the palace, dragged
trembling from his hiding-place to the praetorian
camp, and saluted as emperor by the soldiery.

On the news of the assassination the Senate
met and resolved to restore the ancient constitu-
tion. They were at first supported by four urban
cohorts ; and, for the last time in Roman history,
the watchword was given by the consuls. Chaerea,
who came to ask for it, was received with loud
applause ; and the word, chosen was Lihertas.
But the praetorian soldiers were determined that
the supreme power should be their own gift ;
and the people, far from desiring a return to the
troublous times of the republic, regarded the
emperor as a refuge against senatorial oppression
and many masters as the worst of evils. On
the second day only one hundred senators obeyed
the summons of the consuls to the Temple of
Jupiter, whence their own militia, after clamorously
calling on them to choose an emperor, repaired,
on their hesitation, to the camp and took the
oath of fidelity to Claudius. The Senate there-
upon submitted to necessity and decreed to
Claudius all the honours attached to the principate.

1 De Ira, ii. 33.

CHAPTER IV

EXILE IN CORSICA, A.D. 4I-49

The new emperor had all his life been the object
of ridicule and contempt. He was fifty years
old, slow-minded, awkward in his motions, weak
on his legs, with tremulous head and hands
and a tongue too large for his mouth, fearful
to excess, apathetic to such a degree that no
insult could rouse in him resentment nor suffer-
ings move him to pity, greedy and sensuous,
learned, pedantic, and absent-minded — honest
withal and well-meaning. As a child his mother
Antonia described him as a monstrosity, an
unfinished and abandoned attempt of Nature ;
and would say of a man that he was as great a
fool as her son Claudius. The Emperor Augustus,
noted for his grace and beauty, was ashamed
of his strange young kinsman ; and sequestered
him as much as possible from the public view.
He was kept in rough hands under the discipline
of pupilage for an unusually long time, and
admitted to no public honours until after the
death of Augustus, when Tiberius, who treated
him with more consideration, bestowed upon
him consular privileges while still denying him

EXILE IN CORSICA 33

the consulship. To this honour he was at last
promoted by Caligula on his accession ; but
the mortifications he was compelled to endure
at his nephew's Court exceeded all that he had
previously experienced. He became the butt
of the courtiers, and the victim of a thousand
practical jokes played upon him to amuse the
emperor. When he arrived late for dinner he
was made to take the lowest place at the table ;
when he slept, as he usually did after satisfying
his gluttonous appetite, they pelted him with
olive stones or drew slippers over his hands,
so that he might rub his eyes with them on
waking. In Campania, however, where he had
lived in retirement for many years on his exclusion
from public business, in the intervals of the
time given to the pleasures of the table and to
the gaming which he loved, he had cultivated
his understanding, and studied to some effect.
He was an excellent Greek scholar, could make
a good set speech when given time for prepara-
tion, and was the author of numerous works on
historical and grammatical subjects.

Claudius began his reign well. He recalled
the citizens unjustly exiled by his predecessor,
and restored to them their goods ; he repealed
the oppressive new taxes ; he administered
justice personally with great assiduity, assisted
by the consuls and praetors as assessors ; he
burnt aU incriminating letters left by Caligula
after having shown them to the persons con-
cerned ; he forbade the practice of making
bequests to] the emperor to which rich men

34 SENECA

had been accustomed to resort as the only way
of securing the disposition of the rest of their
property in accordance with their will ; and he
restored to the cities from which they had been
taken the statues which Caligula had brought
to Rome. Other measures, such as the pro-
hibition of Jewish ceremonies and the closing
of public-houses, were of a more questionable
character.

But the emperor's dull, timorous, and self-
indulgent nature soon tired of well-doing ; a
creature of habit, and dreading change of any
kind, he fell ever more completely under the
influence of his dissolute, cruel, and rapacious
wife Messalina, and of the freedmen to whose
faces he was accustomed, until at last he became
almost as neglected and despised as he had been
before his accession. That no man is despised
by others until he first despises himself, is an
observation made by Seneca. Claudius despised
himself and was comically conscious of his
weakness. Once when a female witness was
giving her evidence before the Senate, he said :
' This was my mother's maid and freedwoman ;
but she always regarded me as her master. I say
this because there are still some people living in
my house who do not regard me as their master.'

The empress and the freedmen, by working
on his fears, were able to secure the condemna-
tion of anyone whose estates they coveted or
whose designs they suspected ; and, by selling
offices and justice, to amass huge fortunes for
themselves. The two ruling passions of Claudius

EXILE IN CORSICA 35

were for women and for the bloody spectacles
of the arena. The first enslaved him to his suc-
cessive wives and their favourites ; the second
made him find more satisfaction in the con-
demnations which provided material for his
amusements than in the acquittal of accused
persons.

Among those who were recalled from exile
at the beginning of the new reign were the
emperor's nieces, Julia and Agrippina, whom
their brother Caligula, with his usual inconstancy,
had banished after having heaped upon them
every kind of honour. Julia was beautiful and
ambitious ; and Seneca, attached as he was to
the house of Germanicus, was much in her
society. The emperor also conversed with her
often alone and seemed likely to fall under her
influence. Messalina, w^ho received from the
proud beauty neither honour nor flattery, became
jealous and alarmed. Julia's husband had been
suggested as a possible successor to Caligula
after his assassination,^ and the remembrance
of this may perhaps have enabled the empress
to persuade Claudius again to banish her within
a year of her recall from exile. However that
may be, banished she was on a charge of adultery,
and shortly afterwards put to death in her place
of exile. Seneca, in the brief struggle for power
between the empress and Julia, had attached
himself to Julia, and shared her disgrace. He
was accused of a criminal intrigue with Julia and
banished to Corsica by a decree of the Senate.^

1 Josephus, Ant. Jud. xix. 4. ^ Dion Cassius, Ix. 8,

36 SENECA

A capital sentence was first proposed ; but
this, on the emperor's interposition, was changed
to one of exile.^

From the barren and inhospitable shores
of Corsica, where Seneca in middle life was de-
tained for nearly eight years, he wrote, after an
interval of six months from his arrival, the ' Con-
solation ' to his mother H el via which Bolingbroke
has paraphrased in his ' Reflections upon Exile.'
She must grieve, he tells her, neither for his
sake nor her own. Not for his ; for he is not
unhappy. All that he has lost, all that fortune
had so lavishly bestowed upon him — honours,
money, fame — he had never held as if they were
his own.

I kept a great interval between me and them.
She took them, but she could not tear them from
me. No man suffers by bad fortune, but he who
has been deceived by good. If we grow fond of her
gifts, fancy that they belong to us, and are perpetually
to remain with us, if we lean on them, and expect to be
considered for them, we shall sink into all the bitterness
of grief as soon as these false and transitory benefits
pass away, as soon as our vain and childish minds,
unfraught with solid pleasures, become destitute even
of those which are imaginary. But if we do not suffer
ourselves to be transported by prosperity, neither shall
we be reduced by adversity. Our souls wiU be of proof
against the danger of both these states ; and having
explored our strength we shaU be sure of it.^

All that is best in man, he urges, lies beyond

^ Consol. ad Pol. xxxvii. : ' Deprecatus est pro me senatum,
et vitam mihi non tantum dedit, sed etiam petiit.'
* Consol, ad Helviam, v. (Bolingbroke's translation.)

EXILE IN CORSICA 37

the power of others. It cannot be given ; it
cannot be taken away. No change of place —
and exile is nothing more — can take from him
the glorious spectacle of the universe, nor the
contemplating mind, roaming sacred and im-
mortal through all the past and all the future,
which is itself the noblest part of that universe.
In support of his contention, not very con-
vincing in itself, that since so many people quit
their country of their own accord there can be
no great hardship in an involuntary exile, Seneca
gives an interesting account of the Rome of his
day:

Consider Rome. How few of the inhabitants of
that vast city are Romans ! They come from colonies
and municipalities ; they flow together from the whole
world. Some are brought by ambition ; some by their
public duties ; others have been entrusted with missions ;
luxury in search of opportunities, and industry seeking
a larger field for action, entice others. Many come in
search of pleasure ; many others to improve their minds
by liberal studies ; while some bring their beauty and
others their eloquence to market. Every race of man
hastens to the city which offers the greatest prizes both
to virtue and to vice.

If, then, his mother has no cause to grieve for
him, neither should she grieve for herself. To
the loss of a protector he knows that she is in-
different, for she has never cared for the success
of her sons in respect of her own interests. For
her distress at her son's absence it is indeed harder
to find a remedy. But he exhorts her to console
herself with her other sons, to one of whom,
Gallio, his honours will be chiefly valuable as

38 SENECA

ornaments to be laid at her feet ; to the other,
Mela, his leisure, as it may enable him to enjoy
more of her society. Her grandchild, Novatilla,^
has recently lost her mother ; let Helvia be a
mother to her and undertake the formation of her
mind and manners ; she will find relief in an
occupation so honourable. Her widowed sister,
too, will prove to her the greatest comfort of all.
It is not, however, to these that she must look
for the real cure of her distress. That must be
something beyond the reach of fortune ; and
can only be found in the philosophical studies to
which she must return. Philosophy, if in good
faith she receive it within her soul, will leave no
room for grief or for anxiety, or for the unprofit-
able troubles of a vain despair ; to all other faults
and infirmities her breast has long been closed,
with philosophy it will be closed to these also.
Seneca ends his letter by describing his occupations
on the island :

Since you will be constantly thinking of me whether
you will or no ; since, indeed, I shall be with you more
than your other children, not because I am dearer to
you than they, but because the hand naturally seeks
the painful spot, I will tell you how to think of me.
Picture me, then, as happy and active, believe that
all is as well with me as possible ; and all is really
well when the soul, freed from cares, is at leisure for
its own business, now taking pleasure in lighter studies,
now in an eager pursuit of truth rising to the contem-

1 This was the daughter of GalUo, then known as Novatus.
To bim Seneca dedicated his treatise De Ira published in 41, in
the interval between the death of Caligula and his banishment
to Corsica.

EXILE IN CORSICA 39

plation of its own nature and that of the universe.
First, I consider the land and its situation ; next, the
surrounding sea with its ebb and flow ; then the space
betwixt heaven and earth, and all its terror-striking and
tumultuous appearances — the thunder and lightning, the
clouds and hurricanes, the snow and hail ; and, lastly,
my mind, leaving behind in its progress all that is below,
pierces through to the heights, and enjoys the most
beautiful spectacle of things divine, while, mindful of its
eternity, it wanders through all that is past and dreams
of all that through all the ages is to come.^

Another treatise, or fragment of a treatise,
of a very different character has generally been
ascribed to Seneca, and is supposed to have been
written by him from his place of exile. This
is the ' Consolation to Polybius ' on the death of
his brother. The rich freedman Polybius acted
as literary secretary {a studiis) to Claudius — an
important post under that learned prince — and
was the author of prose translations of Homer
into Latin and of Virgil into Greek. Not only is the
'Consolation' filled with the most abject flattery,
both of him and yet more of the emperor, but it
is flattery of such a kind, so maladroit, so obviously
insincere, that it is hard to believe that it can ever
have given pleasure to a human being; and still
harder to suppose that a learned, witty, and self-
respecting man of the world, with the talent for
pleasing which even his critics allowed Seneca to
possess — a writer, moreover, very sensitive in the
matter of his own reputation — could have imagined

1 Peragratis humilioribus, ad summa prorumpit, et pulcherrimo
divinorum spectaculo fruitur, aeternitatisque suae memor, in
omne quod fuit futurumque est omnibus saeculis, vadit.

40 SENECA

that it was capable of giving such pleasure.
Claudius is complimented on the excellence of his
memory — Claudius who inquired when Messalina
was coming to dinner on the day after her execu-
tion ^ ; Polybius is assured that he is on a level with
Homer and Virgil, and that if he celebrates the
acts of the emperor, in whose super-excellence he
may find at once material for his history and a
perfect model for historical composition, his work
will be read by the latest posterity.

All the serious works of Seneca abound with
lofty and striking thoughts so happily expressed
that they stamp themselves upon the mind.
Scarce any writer has been more often quoted
with or without acknowledgment, or more deserves
quotation, than he of whose treatises it has been
said by one of the best of English critics that in
their combination of high thought with deep
feeling they have rarely, if ever, been surpassed.
But high thought and deep feeling and moral
dignity are alike absent from the ' Consolation to
Polybius.' There is hardly a sentence in it worthy
of quotation. The sentiment is commonplace
where it is not affected. The writer observes

^ Consol. ad Pol. xxxiii. : 'Tenacissiraa memoria retulit.* At
first sight it seems incredible that Seneca could have written this
except in conscious mockery, on which an unlimited faith in the
emperor's dullness of apprehension could alone have emboldened
him to venture. Even the flatterers of Louis XIV did not speak
of his frugality or humility, nor would it have served them to do
so. Flattery to gain its end must rest, however superficially, on
some foundation of fact. But the learned Claudius may really
have had a good verbal memory, often to be found in combina-
tion with the forgetfulness that comes from want of interest or
attention

EXILE IN CORSICA 41

of the Stoic school to which Seneca belonged,
that its philosophers were more remarkable for
hardness than for judgment, and that had they
ever known what it was to suffer real adversity
they would have been compelled to recant their
doctrines and confess the truth. Moreover, Seneca
was no flatterer; for the noble panegyric of the
young Nero's clemency, written before the emperor
had forfeited all title to that virtue, and at a time
when it was of high importance to the common-
wealth to interest the vanity which was his ruling
passion in the maintenance of his reputation in
that regard, was not flattery. Tacitus tells us that,
in Seneca's last message to Nero, he reminded
him that he was not given to adulation, adding
that no one knew this better than the emperor,
who had more reason to complain of his freedom
than of his servility .^ Again, we are told that his
enemies, when plotting his fall, among many
other accusations charged him with aversion to
the emperor's favourite amusements, with depre-
ciating his skill in horsemanship, and with thinking
scorn, and expressing it, even of the celebrated
voice. ^ He himself in the De dementia, after
describing the golden age that had followed the
accession of Nero, says that he does not dwell
upon this picture to flatter the emperor's ears,
for that he would always rather trouble them by
a truth than please them by adulation. Dion

^ Tac. Ann. xv. 6i : ' Nee sibi promptum in adulationes
ingenium. Idque nulli magis gnarum, quam Neroni, qui saepius
libertatem Senecae, quam servitium expertus esset.'

^ Ann. xiv. 52.

42 SENECA

Cassius, it is true, or his abbreviator, in the course
of that singular invective against Seneca which
contrasts so strangely with his earlier references
to him, says that he addressed a book full of
flattery from Corsica to the imperial freedmen ;
but adds, that on his return from exile he
was ashamed of it and succeeded in suppress-
ing it.i The conjecture of Diderot is, that the
original treatise having perished that which we
now possess is a forgery, composed by one of the
numerous hostile critics of the life and writings of
Seneca whom the conservative reaction against
him in the second century called into existence,
and that it was designed to load with odium and
ridicule philosopher, freedman, and emperor alike.
Much of it certainly reads like a parody; for
those characteristics of Seneca, which are easy of
imitation or caricature — the short sentences, the
antitheses, the sudden turns, the rhetoric, and so
forth— are all there ; while there is little trace
of his wit, or subtlety, or imagination, or depth,
or mental elevation. The climax is replaced by
anti-climax, the sursum corda by unworthy re-
pinings of which Ovid might have been ashamed.
Yet glad though one might be to take refuge
in the surmise of Diderot from a conclusion
discreditable to Seneca, the internal evidence of
his authorship is almost irresistible, and the cir-
cumstances in which a man of his temperament
then found himself go far to explain, though they
cannot altogether excuse, the temporary super-
session of his finer instincts. There are passages

* Dion, Ixi. lo.

EXILE IN CORSICA 43

in the treatise so characteristic of Seneca, both
in manner and in matter, that they may seem to
readers famihar with his other writings almost
beyond the skill of an imitator.^

In the last chapter, after exhorting Polybius
to distract his mind from his sorrow by plunging
more deeply than ever into his learned studies,
the writer, by a sudden and characteristic turn,
admits that to root it out altogether would
neither be possible nor even desirable.

Let your tears flow [he says] as nature will ; neither
check nor encourage them. But do not hug your sorrow,
or think that by so doing you honour the dead. Let
your lost brother be often in your thoughts, talk natur-
ally about him, meditate on his excellent qualities and
describe them to others ; tell them all that he might
have been had he lived. You will forget him and cease
to honour his memory if you associate it with sadness,
for the soul naturally turns away from what is painful.

These very arguments in the same sequence
but in different words, this very advice and con-
solation, Seneca many years later addressed to
another friend who had lost a little son.^ The

^ E.g. in chap, xxviii. : ' Si velis credere altius veritatem
intuentibus, omnis vita supplicium est. In hoc profundum
inquietumque projecti mare, alternis aestibus reciprocum, et
modo allevans nos subitis incrementis. modo majoribus damnis
deferens, assidueque jactans, nunquam stabili consistimus loco :
pendemus et fluctuamur, et alter in alterum illidiniur, et aliquando
naujragium Jacimus, semper timemus.'

* Ep. 99. Cp. especially the reflection in the ' Consolation,'
' Naturale est enim, ut semper animus ab eo refugiat ad quod
cum tristitia revertitur,' with that in the letter, ' Nemo enim
libenter tristi conversatur, nedum tristitiae ' ; and the advice
in the former, ' Omnia dicta ejus ac facta et aliis expone, et
tibimet ipse commemora,' with that of the latter, 'De illo fre-
quenter loquere, et memoriam ejus quantum potes celebra.'

44 SENECA

coincidence may, of course, have its origin in
the skill of a forger, but in that case he must
have possessed a power of reserve very unusual
in his kind ; for we have here no caricature, but
an apparent example of the manner in which a
train of thought recurs to a writer after a long
interval of years when once again treating a
similar subject.

Moreover, when we consider the circumstances
in which Seneca then found himself, and the
character of the man, we find it less difficult
to believe in his authorship. In the prime of
life, at the summit of his fame, ambition, and
popularity {'turn maxime placentem'), having
already entered through his quaestorship on the
course of honours, married happily, and with a little
son Marcus to whom he was tenderly attached,
lately reunited to an adored mother whom he
was not likely, if his exile were prolonged, ever
again to see, he was suddenly thrown on a false
charge into solitary exile in a barren and un-
healthy island. And Seneca was not cast in an
heroic mould. Though his gaze was on the
stars, his feet were often in the mud. He him-
self humbly owned that he did not live up to
his own ideals, and said with Horace, ' Video
meliora pr oho que, deteriora sequor.' At the end
of a few years of an exile which was destined
to last for nearly eight, his spirit was broken.
In the verses which he wrote in Corsica he
speaks of himself as a corpse, and threatens
a false friend — whoever that might be — now
become his enemy, with the vengeance of the

EXILE IN CORSICA 45

dead.^ Everything in the island displeased him
— the burning heat of the summer, the terrible
cold of the winter, the unfertile soil, the loneliness
and ruggedness of the country.^

The cri de cceur with which he ends the work
— perhaps the only sincere passage it contains —
bears strong witness to its authenticity :

I have strung together these thoughts [he writes
sadly] to the best of my ability {utcimque potui) from a
brain dulled and confused by the rust of a long inactivity.
They are, perhaps, quite unworthy of your attention,
quite unfitted for the object I had in view. But what
would you have ? How can a man overwhelmed by
his own misfortunes give comfort to others ? How can
he find the words he wants, or express his meaning
with felicity, when the only language he hears is one so
harsh and uncouth as to offend the ears even of the
more civilised among barbarians themselves ?

^ Occisi jugulum quisquis scrutaris amici,

Tu miserum necdum me satis esse putas ?
Desere confossum. Victor! vulnus iniquo
Mortiferum impressit mortua saepe manus.

* Non panis, non haustus aquae, non ultimus ignis ;
Hie sola haec duo sunt : exsul et exsilium.

CHAPTER V

RETURN FROM EXILE — LAST YEARS OF
CLAUDIUS, A.D. 48-54

A PALACE revolution at Rome in the year 48
brought the exile of Seneca to an end. Messalina,
made reckless by passion for her lover Silius,
resolved to risk all on a desperate throw, and,
at his urgent entreaty, agreed publicly to marry
him while Claudius was away at Ostia, after
which he was to seize the supreme power and
adopt her son Britannicus. The freedmen of
Claudius — Narcissus, Callistus, and Pallas — fearful
of losing their power and fortunes, hesitated
between three courses — either to do nothing, or
by secret threats of informing the emperor to
sever Messalina from Silius and force her to
abandon her designs, or without further delay
to communicate to Claudius what was going
forward and to risk the destruction that would
almost inevitably follow should Messalina once
more find an opportunity of controlling in
a personal interview the infirm will of the
timorous and besotted Caesar. The last course
recommended itself to Narcissus, at once the
boldest of the freedmen and the most attached
to the emperor. Claudius, informed, was on

RETURN FROM EXILE 47

his way back from Ostia, while in the garden
of his palace the Bacchanalia were being cele-
brated with feasting and drinking and the wildest
excesses. Messahna herself, as a Bacchante, her
hair flowing and shaking the thyrsus, and
Silius, crowned with ivy, led the revels ; and
around them women, clad in skins, danced
and sang in mad self-abandonment. One of
the revellers, who had climbed to the top of a
tree, was asked by his comrades what he saw :
' An awful storm coming up from Ostia,' he re-
plied, in words afterwards regarded as a presage.
Soon after came the news that Claudius knew
all, and was returning post-haste to Rome and
vengeance. The company scattered, and Messalina
went out to meet the emperor with her children,
Octavia and Britannicus. Narcissus, however,
and his confederates contrived to prevent a
meeting ; Claudius, stunned, stupid, and silent,
left all to the freedman ; Silius was seized and
put to death ; and the same night Messalina,
by Narcissus' direction and the emperor's pre-
tended order, suffered the same fate. The news
was brought to Claudius at his dinner. He was
not told whether she died by her own hand or by
that of another, nor had he the curiosity to ask.

In the ensuing days [says Tacitus] he showed no
signs of anger or of hatred, of joy or of grief, or of
any human emotion ; nor was he moved in any degree
by the sight either of his sorrowing children or of
the triumphant satisfaction displayed by Messalina's
accusers.-^

1 Ann. xi. 38.

48 SENECA

The crisis over, the next object of the f reed-
men was to provide a successor to the place and
power of Messahna. The candidate of Narcissus
was AeHa Petina, a former wife of Claudius,
whom he had divorced for trivial reasons/ and
the mother of his daughter Antonia. Callistus
supported the claims of Lollia Paullina, a beau-
tiful woman of immense wealth, who had
been married for a short time to Caligula.
Pallas espoused the cause of Agrippina, the
daughter of Germanicus, the sister of Caligula,
and the niece of the emperor. Claudius, the
slave of habit and easily governed by those
who had access to him, was exposed to the arts
of Agrippina, whose relationship gave her oppor-
tunities not enjoyed by her rivals of alluring
her amorous uncle. This relationship, however,
was in another way an obstacle to the alliance,
for Roman public opinion regarded such marriages
as incestuous, and Claudius himself had recently
been prevailed upon by Agrippina — who wished
to clear the way for her son's marriage — to cancel
the betrothal of his daughter Octavia to Lucius
Silanus by a false charge against that senator
of a criminal attachment to his sister. But the
courtier Vitellius, conspicuously servile even in
an age of servility, who had been employed to
concoct the charge against Silanus, again placed
his services at the disposal of Agrippina, and
easily persuaded the Senate to implore the
emperor, in the public interests, to contract this
marriage. At the same time such marriages

1 ' Ex levibus offensis ' (Suet., Claudius, 26).

RETURN FROM EXILE 49

were declared legal by a decree of the Senate.
Claudius was married to Agrippina, her son
Domitius was betrothed to Octavia and soon
after adopted by the emperor under the name
of Nero, Silanus slew himself, while LoUia, accused
of consulting the Chaldaeans concerning the em-
peror's marriage, was driven into exile, and soon
afterwards obliged to end her life by order of the
empress.

But Agrippina [adds Tacitusj, that she might not
become known through evil deeds alone, obtained for
Annaeus Seneca his recall from exile, and at the same
time the praetorship. She thought that this would be
a popular step, because of his high reputation for learning
and eloquence, and she was, moreover, desirous to entrust
to him the education of her son Nero, whose succession
to the Empire he might be expected to further by his
counsels, bound to Agrippina, as he would be, through
gratitude, and hostile to the house of Claudius out of
resentment of his exile .^

His return to Rome gave Seneca an oppor-
tunity of observing at close quarters the abuses
of one of the worst governments that Rome
had known. The chief feature of the reign of
Claudius was the transfer of the administration
from the ancient magistracies to a kind of imperial
civil service, at the head of which were the freed-
men of the imperial household. The provinces
were governed for the most part by procurators,
or direct representatives of the emperor, chosen
not from among the senators, but from knights
and freedmen ; and to these were committed, by

* Ann. xii, 8.

50 SENECA

a decree of the Senate, the full judicial powers
exercised in Rome by the emperor. In Rome
Claudius became the minister of his freedmen
secretaries, who accumulated vast fortunes by
the sale of honours and commands, pardons
and punishments, and at their pleasure rescinded
the emperor's decisions, tampered with his war-
rants, and cancelled his donatives. Pallas, the
most powerful of them, was his financial secre-
tary, and the paramour of Agrippina. Those
powers, we are told by Tacitus, for which in
former times the rival orders of the State had
so fiercely contended, which had passed from
knights to Senate and from Senate to knights,
and which had been the chief subject of the war
between Marius and Sylla, were by Claudius
given over to his nominees of any rank. The
earlier Caesars had indeed given full powers
to their representatives in provinces such as
Egypt, specially reserved to them under the
constitution of Augustus, but these had always
been knights of distinction — it was reserved to
Claudius to raise the authority of freedmen of
his household to a level with his own and that
of the laws.^

Claudius himself had a passion for sitting
in judgment, which recalls the judge in Racine's
comedy. In the early part of his reign he would
sit all day in the Forum, or in the portico of one
of the temples, hearing cases even on feast-days,

^ Tac. Ann. xii. 60: ' Matios posthac et Vedios et cetera
equitum praevalida nomina, referre nihil attinuerit ; cum
Claudius libertos, quos rei familiari praefecerat, sibique et
legibus adaequaverit.' Also Suet., Claudius, 28.

RETURN FROM EXILE 51

and giving his decisions rather on what ap-
peared to him general principles of equity than
in obedience to the letter of the law. He had a
loud, hoarse voice, difficult to follow, and though
he sometimes showed sagacity on the bench,
his judgments were, we are told, rash and un-
considered, and at times in the highest degree
absurd. He would always decide against the
absent in favour of the present, however in-
voluntary such absence may have been, and
in his anxiety to finish the greatest amount
of business in the shortest possible time would
often pronounce judgment after hearing only
one side of the case. He made no attempt to
preserve his dignity. Pleaders would pull him
back to the bench by his cloak as he was hurry-
ing off to his dinner. On one occasion a knight,
accused of some offence by the meanest kind
of witnesses, was so exasperated by the emperor's
stupidity that he flung his papers at the imperial
head.^ So long, however, as Claudius tried cases
openly no great harm was done. But after a
time he was persuaded by his wives and freed-
men to try political offenders in camera, with his
unworthy favourites as assessors ; and the worst
instances of cruelty and oppression that disgraced
his reign were the result. The opinion of Seneca
on these methods of administration may be
gathered from the pasquinade on the apotheosis
of Claudius which he afterwards wrote, and
from the reforms in the early part of Nero's
reign of which he was the author.

* Suet., Claud, xv.

52, SENECA

Nero was twelve years old when adopted by
Claudius ; Britannicus, the emperor's son, three
years younger. They were now brothers in the
eye of the law, and Nero as the elder was given
precedence. Claudius announced the adoption in
a speech to the Senate, defending it on grounds
suggested to him by Pallas as a step taken in
the public interest with a view to the lightening
of his own labours and the provision of a support
for the childhood of Britannicus. He cited the
precedents of Augustus, who, in the lifetime of
his grandsons, had shared his power with his
stepsons, and of Tiberius, who had adopted his
nephew Germanicus and placed him on an equality
with his own son Drusus.^

In the year 51 Nero, then at the beginning of
his fourteenth year, assumed the toga virilis — a
ceremonial event of much importance in the life
of a young Roman of distinction, for it marked
the close of his childhood and his entrance into
public life. The usual time for this step was the
beginning of the fifteenth year, but Nero's powerful
protectors, anxious by his early advancement
to forward his succession to the principate,
anticipated by a year the natural period of his
majority. The Senate, with characteristic sub-
servience, at once petitioned the emperor by
address that Nero might be empowered to enter
on the consulship in his twentieth year, that in
the meantime as consul designate he might be

1 The contemporary genealogists observed that the adoption
of Nero was the first instance of an adoption into the Claudian
gens although the patrician family of the Claudii was one of
the oldest in Rome.

RETURN FROM EXILE 53

granted proconsular authority outside the city, and
that the title of princeps jiiventutis, or prince of
the youth, might be conferred upon him, to all
which petitions Claudius was graciously pleased
to assent. The soldiers and people were at the
same time gratified with donatives.

Britannicus meanwhile was the object of general
pity. He was thought a boy of much promise,
though whether this opinion was well-founded, or
whether it was merely the result of the interest
naturally excited by his misfortunes, is a question
left doubtful by the historian. He was neglected
by the Court, deprived of the most faithful of his
attendants, and surrounded by the creatures of
Agrippina. At the circus games held in honour
of Nero's majority the people marked the contrast
between that prince's splendid attire adorned
with the triumphal ornaments, and the humble
praetexta, or boy's dress, of Britannicus, and the
heir to the Empire seemed to be indicated by
the distinction. The twelve-year-old child having
continued to call his brother Domitius instead of
Nero after the adoption, this was made matter
of grave complaint by Agrippina to Claudius, who
thereupon removed his former tutors and sub-
stituted for them the stepmother's nominees.

The most important step, however, taken by
Agrippina in her son's interests was the reorganisa-
tion of the praetorian guard under a single chief.
This force, to which the protection of the emperor's
person was entrusted, was at that time under
the joint command of Geta and Crispinus — two
officers who owed their commissions to Messalina,

54 SENECA

and were believed to be devoted to the cause of
her children. They were now removed, on the
pretext that in the interests of discipline it would
be better if the whole force were commanded by
a single prefect, and Afranius Burrhus, a soldier
of great distinction though of humble origin, was
appointed in their room. History has little that
is good to record of Agrippina, but it must be
admitted to her credit that to her the world owed
the rise to power of Burrhus and of Seneca, and
so indirectly the five years of admirable govern-
ment which those statesmen afterwards enabled
it to enjoy.

Though Seneca obeyed the call of Agrippina
to return to Rome and undertake the educa-
tion of her son, he would have preferred to make
other use of his recovered liberty. His own wish
was to settle in Athens, as Atticus had done, and
there to live a contemplative life in the study of
moral and natural philosophy. He soon perceived
how cruel and profligate was the disposition
of his young pupil; and, though he persuaded
himself that he had in some degree succeeded
in mollifying it, he is said to have observed in
conversation with his intimates that if ever the
young lion tasted human blood the ingrained
ferocity of his nature would assert itself.^

In the year 53 Nero, then in his seventeenth
year, was married to Octavia ; and in the same
year made his first appearance in the Senate as
an orator by pleading the cause of the citizens of
Ilium. This speech was in Greek. It dealt with

^ Scholiast in Juv. Sat. 5, 109.

RETURN FROM EXILE 55

the legendary connection of Rome with Troy
and the descent of the JuHan race from Aeneas ;
and won from the wilHng Senate, with the total
remission of taxes to the men of Ilium which was
its nominal, the applause which was its real, object.
This success was followed by a Latin speech
on behalf of Bonona which had been wasted by
fire, and a large subsidy in aid of the citizens
was the result. Of all the arts eloquence pos-
sessed the least attraction for Nero, and those
speeches, which excited great admiration, were
the compositions of Seneca.

In the following year (54) a succession of strange
occurrences was thought to portend a revolution.
There were rumours of monstrous births ; tents
and standards were struck by lightning ; one
magistrate from each rank — a quaestor, an aedile,
a tribune, a praetor, and a consul — died within a
few months. The emperor's health was failing ;
and he was beginning to show some symptoms
of a returning affection for his son Britannicus,
whose interests were advanced by the still powerful
freedman. Narcissus. One day he exclaimed in
his cups that though he was fated to suffer the
crimes of all his wives, he was fated also to
punish them.^ Agrippina, thoroughly alarmed,
resolved to act ; and with the help of a woman
called Locusta — a poisoner, we are told, long
considered a necessary instrument of the Court —
gave poison to her husband in his favourite dish
of mushrooms. The death was concealed, and

1 Tac. Ann. xii. 64 : 'Fatale sibi, ut conjugum flagitia ferret,
dein puniret.'

56 SENECA

Britannicus with his sisters kept within the palace,
till all was in readiness for the peaceful succession
of Nero. The Senate had been summoned on
the news of the emperor's illness, and vows were
offered for his recovery. At last at midday on
October 13, the doors of the palace were flung
open, Nero, escorted by Burrhus, presented to the
guard and, no rival appearing, received with
acclamation. Burrhus next brought him to the
camp ; where, after he had addressed the soldiers
and promised them a donative, he was saluted as
imperator. The choice of the soldiers was con-
firmed by a decree of the Senate, and followed
by the ready submission of the provinces.

CHAPTER VI

THE QUINQUENNIUM NERONIS, A.D. 54-59

The first business of the Senate in the new reign
was to decree a public funeral to Claudius, and
his apotheosis. On the day of the funeral Nero
made a speech composed for him by Seneca.^
So long as he spoke of the antiquity, triumphs,
and honours of the Claudian race, of the unbroken
prosperity in external affairs that distinguished the
reign of Claudius, and of the taste of that prince for
letters and the arts, he was heard with approval ;
but when he went on to praise the late emperor's
wisdom and foresight his hearers could not restrain
their laughter ; ' though the speech,' adds Tacitus
with characteristic ambiguity, ' like all Seneca's
compositions, was of remarkable elegance and
charm, for indeed there was something in the
man's turn of mind which was exactly fitted to
the taste of that generation/ It is probable that
the failure of this part of his speech did not
greatly displease the imperial orator ; for in spite
of the magnificence of the funeral ceremonies,
the memory of Claudius and the apotheosis itself

1 It was observed that he was the first of the emperors whose
speeches were written for him by others. » .,

58 SENECA

were the subjects of contemptuous ridicule at
the Court. Claudius, said Gallio, in allusion to
the hooks with which the bodies of condemned
criminals were drawn down the steps of the
Gemoniae and flung into the Tiber, had been
dragged to heaven with a hook.^ Nero exclaimed
that now it was clear that mushrooms were food
for the gods ; and Seneca produced his famous
jeu cV esprit under the title of the ' Apocolocyntosis
or Pumpkinification of Claudius.'

In this satirical medley of prose and verse
the arrival of Claudius at the gate of heaven with
dragging foot and perpetually shaking head is
described ; his reception by Hercules, who,
accustomed as he is to monsters, is so perturbed
by the sight of this one that he has to look closely
before he can distinguish ' a sort of man,' and
believes himself at odds with a thirteenth labour ;
the delight of Claudius on hearing himself addressed
in Greek, and the hope he derives therefrom of
being able to add his own histories to the library
of heaven ; the debate in heaven on his admission,
and his expulsion at the instance of Augustus,
who makes his maiden speech on the occasion.
Next we hear of his descent to the infernal regions,
under the escort of Mercury, by way of Rome, where
the sight of his own funeral taking place amid
general rejoicings makes him understand for
the first time that he is dead ; of his delight on
his arrival in hell to find himself in the midst
of old friends, and his discomfiture at the unex-
pected reply to his inquiry by what good fortune

» Dion, Ix. 35.

THE QUINQUENNIUM NERONIS 59

they all came to be there assembled — ' You sent
us, murderer of all your kin ' ; of his trial, followed
by the condemnation to play at dice for ever with
a bottomless box ; and, finally, of his conveyance
to Caligula, who claimed him as his slave on the
plea of having often been seen beating him on
earth, and his eventual assignment as a clerk
to Menander, Caligula's freedman. The piece,
witty and amusing though it be and unique of
its kind in Latin literature, shows a lack of
good feeling more characteristic of the time
than of Seneca, to whose reputation it can add
nothing.

The idleness, dissipation, and hatred of business
which distinguished the young emperor combined
with his vanity and love of popularity to throw
the whole administration of affairs in the early
part of his reign into the hands of Seneca and
Burrhus. The single object of these two states-
men appears to have been the public good, and as a
consequence of this singleness of aim no shadow
of misunderstanding from first to last marred the
harmony of their mutual relations — a rare circum-
stance, as Tacitus remarks, in the history of public
men. The virtues of the one supplemented
those of the other. Burrhus was known for the
austerity of his life, the bluntness of his speech,
and the severity of his military discipline ; Seneca,
notwithstanding his stoicism, was a courtier and a
wit, he knew how to charm others without loss of
personal dignity, and was a master of eloquence.

After the funeral ceremonies of Claudius had
been completed and the pretence of mourning

6o SENECA

laid aside/ Nero made his entry into the Senate-
house and announced the pohcy of the new reign
in a speech composed for him by Seneca. After
reminding his hearers that his boyhood had been
passed in no scenes of civil or domestic discord,
and that he had consequently no injuries to avenge
or hatreds to satisfy, he proceeded to touch on
the abuses of the late regime and to explain the
new system of government which he proposed to
follow. The reign of law, he said in effect, was
to replace that of caprice. He did not propose to
busy himself personally in the trial of offenders ;
the scandal of the secret investigations in the
Cabinet where accusers and accused alone were
present was to end ; the court was no longer to be
a market where offices, privileges, and pardons
were sold to favourites ; his private fortune must
be distinguished from the public revenue, his
household from the ministers of the republic.
The Senate were to be reinstated in its ancient
functions, and consular tribunals to be restored
to Italy and the senatorial provinces, with the
right of appeal to the Senate.^ Let the Senate,
he said in conclusion, address themselves to the
administration of the republic ; he himself would
take thought for the armies committed to his care.
This speech was heard with exultation by

1 ' Peractis tristitiae imitamentis ' {Ann. xiii. 4).

- This refers to the division of the provinces into imperial
and senatorial provinces made by Augustus — the latter being
administered by the Senate, the former directly by himself
through procurators. Under Claudius the distinction had been
practically abolished, and the whole Empire, with a few excep-
tions, sucli as Achaia, governed by the emperor's procurators
who, like FeUx in Judaea, were often freedmen.

THE QUINQUENNIUM NERONIS 6i

the senators. They decreed that it should be
engraved in letters of silver, and read publicly
at the beginning of each new year, hoping to
bind the emperor by this recurring publication
to observe the charter of liberties it contained.^
Nor were those hopes at first deceived. The
Senate, under the direction doubtless of Seneca
and Burrhus, made early use of its recovered
liberties, and Acts were passed dealing with recent
abuses. The young emperor himself declared his
intention of walking in the steps of his ancestor
Augustus, and seized every opportunity of showing
courtesy, humanity, and liberality. The heavier
taxes were reduced or repealed. Informers were
discouraged, and their fees reduced to a fourth.
The ruinous burdens which successful candidates
for honours had been compelled to endure were
reduced within more reasonable limits ; appeals
were instituted from the judges to the Senate ;
the law against forgery was strengthened ; and
lawyers' fees were regulated.^

These reforms were opposed by Agrippina,
who had no wish for the downfall of a system
by which she had profited so largely. But her
influence was already on the wane. When her
power had been threatened in the preceding reign,
she had contrived the death of Claudius in order
to preserve it, but she was now to find that her
ambition had overleapt itself. At first, indeed,
all had gone well. Her violence and imperious
temper intimidated Nero and bent him to her
wishes, though he longed to shake off a detested

» Dion Cassius, Ixi. 3. * Suet. Nero, x.

62 SENECA

yoke. He began by heaping honours on the
mother to whom he owed the Empire. She
accepted these honours as her due, and was
imprudent enough continually to remind him
of his obligations. The assassination of Silanus,
Proconsul of Asia, gave early proof of what might
be expected from the continuance of her power.
Silanus had owed his safety in the preceding reigns
to his inactivity and notorious lack of ambition,
but as a descendant of Augustus he had been
spoken of as a possible rival to Nero, and he was
the brother of another Silanus for whose death
under Claudius Agrippina had been responsible.
Agrippina, therefore, caused him to be poisoned
at his own table, employing as her agents two
men charged with the management of the imperial
estate in the province. The crime was committed
with so little attempt at concealment that it was
a secret to none. Narcissus, too, who had opposed
her marriage with Claudius, was imprisoned with
such severity that he took refuge in self-destruction.
Other executions would have followed but for
the interposition of Seneca and Burrhus. Nero,
who was innocent of the murder of Silanus and
had been opposed to the punishment of Narcissus,
was glad to support his two ministers, and in so
doing to satisfy his vanity by earning a reputation
for clemency and good government. Moreover,
the man who had most influence with Agrippina
was the fabulously rich freedman Pallas, her
paramour, whose moroseness and arrogance had
made him universally detested. The destruction
of the power of the freedmen was a preliminary

THE QUINQUENNIUM NERONIS 63

step essential to the restoration of the just and
humane administration contemplated by Seneca,
and so long as Agrippina remained all-powerful
that object could not be effected.

An incident that occurred before Nero had
been many months emperor served to show
which side had gained the victory in this brief
struggle for power between the reformers and
the upholders of the old system. Agrippina
had been accustomed during the principate of
Claudius to appear in the company of that feeble
sovereign on state occasions and openly to share
his sovereignty. Nor had she anticipated that
her position in that respect would be changed for
the worse by the succession of her son to power.
But one day Nero was seated on his throne and
about to receive some Armenian ambassadors,
when his mother entered the audience chamber
and advanced with the intention of seating herself
beside him to share in their reception. Though
all who were present were indignantly conscious
that such an assessor would lower the imperial
dignity in the eyes of the Armenians, Seneca
alone had the courage to intervene. At his
whispered suggestion the prince left his throne
and advanced down the hall, as if out of respect
to greet his mother. An excuse was then found
for postponing the reception of the delegates, and
the scandal was averted.

Seneca has been charged with ingratitude to
Agrippina, to whom he owed his return from
exile and the appointment as Nero's tutor on
which were founded his wealth and greatness.

64 SENECA

But he had to choose between resistance to the
power of the empress and the abandonment
of his projects of reform, and it is by no means
clear that he ought to have chosen the latter.
In his treatise De Beneficiis he says that if a
man has received favours from a tyrant he ought
to repay him with what benefits he can, so long
as he can do so without injury to others.^ To
have supported the cruel and corrupt influence
of Agrippina would have been signally to have
violated this condition ; while if he had retired
from public life, deserted Burrhus, and surrendered
his opportunities of serving the State, he would
none the less have been accused of ingratitude
by Agrippina, who had counted on his active
support.

At all events the prosperity of the first five
years of the reign of Nero, the famous quin-
qiiennmm Neronis, during which the emperor,
abandoning himself to his pleasures, left the whole
business of the State to Seneca and Burrhus,
silenced for the time the detractors of those
statesmen. The Emperor Trajan was afterwards
wont to declare that this, in his judgment, was
the period in which the Romans enjoyed the
best government under the Empire.^ Even the
malicious historian Dion Cassius, enemy though
he was to Seneca's reputation, writes that these
statesmen, once the full control of affairs had
fallen into their hands, exercised it with a justice

1 De Bene}, vii. 20.

* ' Merito Trajanus saepius testatur procul differre cunctos
principes Neronis quinquennio ' (Aurelius Victor, de Caesar, c. 5).

THE QUINQUENNIUM NERONIS 65

and an ability which won for them universal
applause.^ It was something when in the strange
course of human destiny supreme power over the
civilised world had fallen into the hands of a
vicious and worthless youth, not only to have
saved five years from the wreck, but even to have
made them memorable for their excellence. That
this feat was accomplished by Seneca cannot
be denied, though the means he employed to re-
tain and confirm his power unquestionably need
defence.

The steps taken at the end of the year (54)
to repel a Parthian invasion of Armenia, and
the appointment of Corbulo, an able general,
whose sole claim to promotion lay in his merits
to the chief military command there, increased
the confidence felt in the administration, and
were taken as signs that the era of appointments
by favour and intrigue was at an end. The
Senate wished to erect gold and silver statues to
the emperor, and to call the month of December
by his name, but he modestly declined these
honours. Nor would he listen to delators who
brought accusations of disaffection against knights
and senators.

The year 55, the second of the reign, was
marked by fresh acts of a wise indulgence to
which the Romans had been unaccustomed since
the early years of Tiberius. The young emperor
pledged himself to a policy of conciliation in
numerous speeches in which the world recognised
the hand of Seneca. These speeches, adds Tacitus,

1 Dion, Ixi. 4.

66 SENECA

he put into the prince's mouth either in order to
display his own talents or else that all might know
in what honourable principles he had trained
the mind of his imperial pupil. Most of the
historian's references to Seneca are marked by a
certain reserve or unfriendly suggestion as of one
anxious not to be unfair yet resolved to do no
more than bare justice to a man with whom he
was out of sympathy. In this instance it would
seem, on the face of it, at least as probable that
in interesting Nero's vanity in a reputation for
clemency, and engaging him by public professions
to maintain it, Seneca was acting on public grounds
as that he was merely endeavouring to win applause
for himself.

It was at this time that he addressed to the
emperor the finely conceived and nobly expressed
treatise De dementia, the first part of which
has been happily preserved to us. In this treatise
the philosopher described the emperor as not only
the principle of unity that linked together the
vast regions of the Empire, but also the mind that
directed the huge body, the limbs of which it
restrained from mutual destruction. The re-
public, he said, and Caesar have so grown together
that they cannot be torn asunder without the
destruction of both, and the union is such that
•Caesar will practise clemency to his subjects for
the same reason that a man is merciful to his
own members. Bleeding or a surgical operation
may be required, but he will shed no blood nor
inflict any pain that is not inevitably necessary
for the common good. Seneca pictures the young

THE QUINQUENNIUM NERONIS 67

prince serenely contemplating the vast masses
of his subjects — so various in race and character,
so ready for internecine strife, kept in peace only
by their common allegiance ; and thus speaking to
himself :

From out the host of mortal beings I have been
chosen and thought worthy to do the work of the gods
upon the earth. I have been given the power of life
and death over all the nations. To determine the
condition and to control the destinies of every race
and of every individual is my absolute prerogative.
Whatever Fortune has to give, through my work she
gives it ; from my rephes as from a fountain peoples
and cities draw their happiness. There is no prosperity
in all the world save by my favour and allowance. These
countless swords, sheathed by my peace, at a sign from
me would leap from their scabbards. It is in my power,
were I so minded, utterly to destroy or expatriate whole
nations ; their liberties are mine to give or to withhold ;
kings at my word become slaves ; the brow of whom I
will I encircle with a diadem ; cities come into being or
are lost according to my will. In this supreme position
neither anger, nor the natural impetuosity of youth,
nor the foolish stubbornness of men hardly to be borne
by the most patient of tempers, nor even that dire
ambition so common in princes drawing them on to
display their power by terror-striking acts, have ever
moved me to inflict a single unjust punishment. The
humblest blood is precious to me ; my sword lies buried
in its sheath ; if a suppliant has nothing else to plead,
yet as a man he will find favour in my sight. My severity
I keep concealed ; my clemency in the open and ready
for use. I have rescued the laws from the obscurity
and neglect into which they had fallen, and I observe
them as if I too had to render an account of my actions.
I have been touched by the youth of one prisoner, by the
age of another ; the rank of some, the helplessness of

68 SENECA

others, have moved me to pardon ; where no other
reason for mercy could be found, I have forgiven for the
pleasure of forgiving. If this day the immortal gods
were to bid me give an account of my stewardship of
the human race the reckoning would show no loss. ' It
is true, Caesar,' replies Seneca ; ' and you may claim
with confidence that of all the citizens entrusted to
your care not one either through open violence or secret
treachery has been lost to the commonwealth. Your
only ambition has been to be praised for the rarest
quality of all — a glory vouchsafed to none of your pre-
decessors— the glory of innocence. You have not wasted
your pains. That singular goodness of yours has not
been valued grudingly or unwilHngly. Your subjects
are grateful indeed. No individual was ever so dear
to another as you, their great and lasting treasure, are
to the whole Roman people. But you have undertaken
a heavy task. In this first year you have given us a
taste of your rule, and have set up a new standard by
which you yourself will be judged. No one will any
longer care to remember the times of the divine Augustus
or the early years of Tiberius ; you yourself have supplied
the only model by which men will wish that you yourself
should be guided.'

No man, wrote Seneca, in one of his letters,
can paint a picture though his colours are all
ready unless he knows exactly what it is he wishes
to paint. In this picture of the innocent autocrat
who, making his choice between the two great
rival forces by which men are governed, finds
his strength in their love rather than in their fear,
Seneca anticipated, as he often does, the teach-
ing of Christianity. There may be flattery in his
words, but it is flattery of a noble sort and directed
to a noble end. So far Nero, guided by his
ministers, had really governed his subjects with

THE QUINQUENNIUM NERONIS 69

justice and humanity ; and would have almost
deserved the praise he received had not this
result been attributable rather to his aversion
from business and love of popularity than to
any worthier motive.

In this second year of his reign Nero, who
from the first had abhorred his guiltless and
unhappy wife Octavia, fell passionately in love
with a young freedwoman named Acte. The affair
was confided to the prince's boon companions —
chief among whom was Otho, afterwards emperor
— and to the ministers, but was otherwise a secret.
Seneca and Burrhus, hopeless of reconciling Nero
to Octavia, regarded without displeasure his in-
fatuation for a good-natured girl, whose influence
injured no one while it satisfied the dangerous
passions of her lover in a manner harmless to the
commonwealth. But Seneca carried his com-
plaisance too far if it was at his suggestion that
his most intimate friend, Annaeus Serenus, captain
of Nero's bodyguard, to disguise the real intrigue,
played the part of Acte's lover and openly sent
her the presents which really came from the
emperor. This artifice at first deceived Agrippina ;
but she soon came to know the truth. Always
in extremes, she stormed, menaced, and insulted ;
and then, finding her rage of no effect, passed
to the most abject flattery and submission with
no better success. Nero, when the discovery was
first made, endeavoured to conciliate her by a
rich present of robes and jewellery; but this she
received with disdain, exclaiming that she had
given him all and he was returning her a part.

70 SENECA

Her subsequent submission merely emboldened
him to dismiss her minion Pallas from all his
offices, and openly to bring her power to an end.

On this Agrippina, flinging prudence to the
winds, gave a free rein to the ungovernable
temper which she had inherited from her mother.
Britannicus, she exclaimed, was now of an age
to succeed to that inheritance which her own
injustice had transferred to a usurper. Since so
many crimes had been committed in vain she
would confess them all, and, since by the mercy
of the gods Britannicus still lived, make repara-
tion. She would go to the camp accompanied by
Britannicus and present herself to the soldiers —
bidding them choose between the pedant Seneca,
who with the low-born cripple Burrhus had the
audacity to aspire to govern the world, and the
daughter of Germanicus.^ She was to find, how-
ever, that an emperor was easier to make than to
unmake.

To the unfortunate Britannicus her support
proved even more disastrous than her hostility.
Nero's latent jealousy and suspicion had already
been roused to activity by an incident which had
occurred during the Saturnalia of the preceding
December. There was a game played by Roman
boys consisting in the choice of a ' king ' by lot,
whose commands, whatever they might be, the
rest were obliged one by one to obey. On this
occasion the lot fell on Nero, and to expose
Britannicus to ridicule he ordered him to stand
in the middle and sing a song. The boy obeyed ;

* Tac. Ann. xiii. 14.

THE QUINQUENNIUM NERONIS 71

and sang in so pathetic a manner the misfortunes
of one who had been driven from his father's
house and despoiled of his inheritance, that he
moved all his hearers to compassion.

Agrippina was doubtless aware of her son's
suspicions when she threatened him with the rivalry
of Britannicus ; but she does not seem to have
anticipated their natural result in that prince's
destruction. Such, however, it proved. The minis-
trations of Locusta — the recognised Court poisoner
— were again employed ; and Britannicus was
poisoned at a banquet in the presence of Nero
and his Court. The wine, tried by his taster,
was designedly so heated that he called for water
to cool it, and in the water thus added to his
drink a deadly poison was administered. So
rapid was its effect that he fell back instantly
deprived of sense. A thrill of horror ran
through the company. The more imprudent
dispersed ; others better advised remained seated
and looked fixedly at Nero for their cue. He
with an air of indifference remarked that
Britannicus had from his infancy been subject
to such fits and that he would soon be better.
There was a short silence, and then the feast
proceeded as if nothing had happened. The
terror and consternation visible in the countenance
of Agrippina served to convince all present that
she was as innocent of complicity in the murder
as Octavia herself, who in spite of her extreme
youth had been taught by adversity to conceal
every symptom of feehng. In the same night the
ashes of Britannicus were hurriedly buried in the

72 SENECA

Campus Martius — all preparations having been
made beforehand. In a subsequent edict Nero
defended these hasty obsequies and the omission
of the usual funeral speeches and ceremonies by
a reference to ancient usage ; and, bewailing the
loss of his brother's support, expressed his reliance,
as the last of a family born to Empire, on the
enhanced devotion of Senate and people. The
estate of Britannicus, his houses, and villas, were
divided by the emperor among the gravest and
most honoured of his own friends, with the object,
it was thought, of binding them to acquiescence.
It would not have been safe to refuse the imperial
gifts, but the conduct of such men as Seneca and
Burrhus in accepting them did not escape
animadversion }

No presents, however, could soften the anger
of Agrippina. Her friends were admitted to
secret interviews ; she raised money from every
quarter ; she caressed Octavia ; she made court
to the soldiers ; and extolled the qualities of
certain of the chief among the nobility as though
she were seeking a leader for her party. When
the news of these proceedings reached Nero he
retaliated by discharging her bodyguard and re-
moving her from the palace to another house,
where, always accompanied by a large body of
centurions, he made her a few brief and formal
visits.

Agrippina's enemies now thought that their

^ Tac. Ann. xiii. i8 : 'Nee defuere, qui arguerent viros
gravitatem asseverantes, quod domos, villas, id temporis, quasi
praedam divisissent.'

THE QUINQUENNIUM NERONIS 73

time had come. Junia Silana, formerly her inti-
mate friend and her rival in race, in beauty, and in
wantonness, but whose friendship had been turned
by a private quarrel into hatred, devised a plot
for her ruin. Two clients of Silana, Iturius and
Calvisius, agreed to accuse the empress-mother of
a plot to overthrow Nero and to marry Rubellius
Plautus, a descendant through his mother of
Augustus, whom she would at the same time
place on the throne. An actorc ailed Paris, a
favourite minister of Nero's pleasures, was chosen
to reveal the pretended conspiracy.

Late one night, when the emperor was heavy
with wine, Paris entered his apartment with
tragic countenance and told his story. The
first impulse of the terrified Nero was to give
order for the immediate execution of his mother
and Plautus, but he was dissuaded from doing
so by Burrhus and Seneca, who pointed out the
flimsy nature of the evidence against Agrippina
and the injustice of condemning her unheard.
The next morning Seneca and Burrhus pro-
ceeded to her house to inquire into the matter,
when she defended herself with spirit and success,
and demanded an audience of her son. This
was granted ; and completed the discomfiture
of her opponents. Agrippina knew her son
well. Disdaining to defend herself or to remind
him of his obligations, she boldly denounced
her accusers and demanded redress. Nero, who
was as cowardly as he was cruel and treacherous,
feared those who defied him, and was accus-
tomed to submit to his imperious mother. He

74 SENECA

promised all she asked. Silana was exiled for
life ; Calvisius and Iturius for a term of years.
Paris could not be spared and was forgiven.
On this occasion, at least, Seneca and Burrhus
rescued their former patroness from urgent
danger.

CHAPTER VII

SENECA IN POWER

The two following years (56 and 57) were quiet
and uneventful. Peace reigned throughout the
Empire, while in Rome the Senate, to which a
part of its former authority had been restored,
was occupied in legislative work, especially in
connection with the administration of the
revenue, which was transferred from the quaestors,
to whom it had been entrusted by Claudius,
to prefects who had served as praetors, and
were men of longer experience. The decaying
colonies of Capua and Nuceria were assisted
by the introduction of new drafts of veterans
and by subsidies. The Roman import duty
on slaves was remitted ; but this, observes
Tacitus, was found to be a boon rather in ap-
pearance than in reality to the importer, since
he had already succeeded in transferring the
tax to the consumer by adding it to his price.^

The provincial cities in Italy and else-
where in the Empire enjoyed at this time an
almost complete system of self-government. Their

* Ann. xiii. 31 : 'Quia, cum venditor pendere juberetur, in
partem pretii emptoribus accrescebat/

76 SENECA

institutions had been modelled on those of re-
publican Rome, and unlike those of Rome had
endured in reality as well as in name. Of muni-
cipal magistrates the duumviri, answering to
the consuls, presided over the municipal senate
and exercised judicial powers ; the aediles were
in charge of works and buildings and of the
police ; while the quaestors administered the
revenue. These magistrates were all elected by
the people,^ and were expected by public opinion
to show their sense of the honour conferred
upon them by a gift to their city. Aqueducts,
roads, temples, theatres were habitually pre-
sented to their fellow-citizens by magistrates
during their term of office. Thus the labour of
the community was directed to public and not
to private uses by those to whom the possession
of money had given the power of choosing its
direction, and great prosperity was the result.
' The whole world is full,' wrote the rhetorician
Aristides under the Antonines, ' of gymnasia,
fountains, porticoes, temples, workshops, and
schools ... all the towns are radiant with ele-
gance and splendour, and the land has become
one vast garden.'

In Rome itself all was not so well. The
administration was, it is true, well conducted by
Seneca and Burrhus, to whom the emperor left
the whole business of government. But the de-
testable character of the degenerate aesthete on
the throne began so early as the year 56 to make
itself felt. The public atrocities which followed

* The suffrage was universal and the elections by ballot.

SENECA IN POWER ^^

his personal assumption of the government were
foreshadowed by the crimes and extravagances
by which his private Hfe was aheady stained.
His favourite nocturnal amusement at this time
was to sally forth disguised from his palace into
the streets, accompanied by his boon companions,
whom he would cause to attack those whom
they met, insult women, break open doors, and
plunder shops. Sometimes the people attacked,
not recognising their assailant, would defend
themselves vigorously ; and the marks of their
fists would be visible on the emperor's face the
next day; so, to avoid such accidents for the
future, he directed a body of gladiators to follow
him at a distance, and to use their weapons if
matters became serious. When it became known
that Caesar was the hero of these nocturnal
expeditions his example was followed by others,
whose objects were more practical, and who used
his name to secure their booty ; until, according
to the historian, Rome at night came to resemble
a captured city given over to plunder. His
encouragement of faction fights in the theatres
was scarcely less mischievous.

These years marked the high tide of Seneca's
prosperity. ' Seneca,' wrote the elder Pliny of
that time, ' than whom no man was ever less
beguiled by appearances, was then the prince of
learning and at the summit of that power by
which he was afterwards overwhelmed.' ^ The

* Pliny, NM. xiv. 4 : ' Novissime Annaeo Seneca, principe turn
eruditionis ac potentiae quae postremo nimia fuit super ipsum,
minima utique miratore inanium.'

78 SENECA

most powerful statesman was at the same time
the most admired writer of the day. His speeches,
treatises, and poetry were in everybody's hands.
The rising generation, says Quintihan, would
scarcely read any other author,* and the concoc-
tion of epigrams and aphorisms (sententiae) after
his manner became the literary fashion.

His nephew Lucan, son of the prudent Mela,
was the most brilliant of the poets of the new
school. After other more conventional essays
in poetry he published, while still under twenty-
five years of age, the first part of an epic poem
on the civil wars, written on a completely new plan.
Boldly discarding the whole of the supernatural
machinery of Olympus, considered ever since the
days of Homer an indispensable adjunct to an
epic, he described events and characters with
what historical accuracy his researches could
supply. He had no respect for remote antiquity —
' famosa vetustas miratrixque stn ' ^ — the stirring
scenes of the century which preceded his own
offered material enough for his rushing, impetuous
rhetoric. Why blunt its force and lose all the
interest attaching to the connection between
character and events by invoking the inter-
position of shadowy beings in whom his readers
had ceased to believe ? Keenly interested in
the world as it appeared to him amid the strife
of men, and a violent partisan, he was, like Byron,
of too passionate a nature, and lived too much
in the present to find time for subjective musings,

^ Quint. X. I : ' Turn autem solus hie fere in manibus
adolescentium fuit.' * Phars. iv. 654-5.

SENECA IN POWER 79

for the wonder and pathos of Virgil, or the wide
surmise of Lucretius. He had, as QuintiHan ob-
served, the temperament rather of an orator than
of a poet.^ The romance of reahty, the picture
of a rudderless world and of the interaction of
events and character, for the first time challenged
the ruling idea of every previous epic — the idea
that men were but irresponsible puppets moved
by divine agencies which the seer's eyes were
alone strong enough to detect. The Senecas were
a daring race of innovators who held Olympus in
scanty respect.

I am not such a fool [wrote Seneca in one of his
letters] as to repeat the old soothing lullabies of Epicurus,
and to tell you that the fear of hell is vain, that no Ixion
is bound to a revolving wheel, that the shoulder of
Sisyphus rolls no stone up the hill, that no entrails
can be devoured and restored every day. No one is
childish enough to fear Cerberus and the darkness and the
ghostly appearance of spirits clinging to their skeletons.
Death either consumes us or frees us. If we escape,
better things await us when we have laid down our
burden ; if we are consumed, nothing remains.^

Lucan, in the course of the extravagant com-
pliment to Nero which disfigures the first book
of the ' Pharsalia,' declares that the worship of
all the other gods has been rendered superfluous
at Rome by the presence of that amiable prince ;
and entreats him, when he takes his final leave
of earth, to take up his position well in the centre

* Inst. Ovat. X. i. 90; ' Lucanus ardens et concitatus et
sententiis clarissimus et, ut dicam quod sentio, raagis oratoribus
quam poetis imitandus.*

* Ep. 24.

8o SENECA

of heaven lest the balance of the universe should
be imperilled. In the later and republican part
of the poem he contrasts in a famous line the
triumphant injustice of the gods with the defeated
virtue of Cato.^ And we know that Gallio cared
for none of these things.

Nero was himself a poet as well as a painter, a
sculptor, a musician, and a singer. His first step
on acceding to the principate was to summon
to the palace Terpnus, the most celebrated lute-
player of the day, in whose company he would
spend half the day and half the night listening
to his performances and receiving his instructions.
Lucan, too, the nephew of the chief minister,
was at first in high favour. Nero recalled him
from Athens, where he was finishing his educa-
tion, admitted him to the company of his intimate
friends, and made him quaestor. But Lucan's
poetic success afterwards excited the emperor's
jealousy ; who probably also disapproved of his
disregard for the traditional rules of composition.
The first publication of poems in Rome consisted
in their recitation by the author to an invited
company of friends.^ One day when Nero was
present at a recitation by Lucan of a newly com-
posed poem he affected to be weary, and suddenly
left the room without waiting for the end. This
was an insult the sensitive poet could not forgive.
He revenged himself by lampoons and epigrams
directed against the emperor and his friends, who

^ i. 128 : ' Victrix causa dels placuit, sed victa Catoni.'
2 Attendance on such occasions was an imperative social
obligation, which became to many a nuisance almost intolerable.

SENECA IN POWER 8i

retaliated by forbidding him either to recite or
to pubUsh any further poems. Nothing could
have been thought of more calculated to mortify
and enrage a young author intoxicated by his
popularity and his public and private triumphs.
It was then that he wrote the last part of the
' Pharsalia,' with its stinging attacks on the
imperial system and its exaltation of the heroes
of the republic.

One result of the quarrel between Nero and
Lucan was the attack directed on the new school
by writers connected with the Court. Conspicuous
among these was Petronius, the leader of Nero's
dissolute friends, the arbiter of fashion, an artist
in luxury, a man for whose judgment in such
matters the emperor had so high a respect that
he thought no diversion agreeable or refined until
Petronius had stamped it with the hall-mark of
his approval. In a kind of picaresque character-
novel, unique of its kind in surviving Latin litera-
ture, Petronius introduced an old poet called
Eumolpus, very much out-at-elbows, to plead the
cause of classical tradition against new methods.
Eumolpus complains that in these degenerate
times, when a man has learnt the art of making
glittering epigrams in the schools of rhetoric
and proved a failure at the Bar, he turns to the
composition of poetry as to a haven of rest and
enjoyment. Yet really to be a poet he should be
steeped in literature, he must avoid all popular
or hackneyed diction, his epigrams must not
stand out abrupt and disconnected from the
body of his discourse, but be woven with

82 SENECA

concealed art into the texture of the material they
adorn. Homer and Virgil, and Horace with his
exquisite ielicity— curiosa felicitas— prove this.

For instance [he adds, in direct allusion to the
' Pharsalia '], a man who should be daring enough to
undertake to sing of the Civil War without being in the
central current of literature will sink under the burden.
We do not want him to tell us what really happened ;
historians will do that far better. The poet should
lead us rapidly hither and thither ; he should not hesitate
to use his invention or to have recourse to the intervention
of the gods, so that we may rather gain the impression
of a soul not mistress of herself but inspired by a divine
frenzy than of a witness giving his careful evidence in
a court of justice.^

Eumolpus proceeds to illustrate his meaning
by reciting 295 verses of his own composition,
in which he had rewritten the opening section
of the ' Pharsalia ' according to the traditional
method. The gods of Olympus are introduced;
and more or less direct events. Venus, Mercury,
and Mars are on the side of Caesar ; Apollo,
Diana, Hercules, and Mercury are Pompeians.
But the only result of the experiment is to convince
the reader how right Lucan was to dispense with
this antiquated machinery, especially in a subject
so modern; how superfluous in accounting for
the motives of the various actors in the drama
is the hypothesis of divine suggestion ; and how
by that hypothesis the human interest of the
story is diminished.

The attack on the schools of rhetoric in the
first chapter of what is left to us of the book is
more effective. A sensible protest is there made

» Sat. 118.

SENECA IN POWER 83

against the emptiness of the teaching in such
places. The themes of declamation, the writer
declares, are ridiculous and impossible ; the good
literature of the past is entirely neglected ; the
great object is to achieve smartness of phrase and
an appearance of brilliancy however unrelated these
may be to the realities of life ; the whole is neglected
for the parts : in fact, he concludes, so soon as
eloquence began to be studied as an art and taught
by rule of thumb, men ceased to be eloquent —
just as a man who spends much time in the kitchen
will not be savoury. Whatever takes the fancy
of boys is unlikely to be really fine, yet it is
exactly that which is most admired and studied
in the schools. Quintilian said the same thing
of Seneca when he expressed his regret that one
who could do all that he pleased should so often
through lack of judgment be pleased to do what
was not worth doing, for that if judgment had
been added to his other gifts, instead of being the
delight of boys he might have won the approval
of men of taste.^

The year 58 was illustrated by the victories
of Corbulo over the Parthians in Armenia. The
successes of this able commander, who had restored
the almost ruined discipline of the forces under
his command, were recognised by the Senate after
their usual manner in decrees for statues and
triumphal arches to the emperor under whose
auspices they were achieved. In the same year
Seneca incurred a certain degree of unpopularity
in connection with the trial and condemnation
of Publius Suilius. This man had been a notable

^ Quintilian, x. i.

84 SENECA

informer under Claudius, and the chief instrument
of Messalina's cruelty. He it was who, at the
instance of the Court, brought the charges which
proved fatal to Julia, daughter of Drusus, Valerius
Asiaticus, Lupus, and many others. He had, in
fact, been the Fouquier Tinville of the worst years
of Claudius ; and as such was particularly odious
to the humane Seneca to whom the death of no
Roman citizen during his term, of power has been
imputed by any historian. After the death of
Claudius and the change of system, Suilius showed
no penitence for his misdeeds — preferring, says
Tacitus, the reputation of a criminal to the atti-
tude of a suppliant. In the year 58 he was prose-
cuted under the lex Cincia for having accepted
fees as an advocate beyond the legal limit. The
charge itself was unfair, for the law was obsolete
and had been habitually disregarded ; but his
adversaries were resolved that Suilius should not
altogether escape the penalty of his misdeeds, and
their impatience would not suffer them to await
the issue of the indictment for peculation and
oppression in his government of Asia which, also
brought against him, could not, owing to diffi-
culties in collecting evidence, be proceeded with
for a year. Suilius, in no wise abashed, retorted
by accusations against Seneca which, reported
by Tacitus, and repeated with amplifications by
Dion or his abbreviator, Xiphilinus, have been ac-
cepted with too ready a credence by later historians.

Seneca [he said], who had been most justly exiled
by Claudius, could never forgive that prince's friends.
He had passed his life in futile controversies that amused

SENECA IN POWER 85

the inexperience of youth ; and was envious of those who
had kept burning the torch of Hving and uncorrupted
eloquence in the defence of their fellow-citizens. He
(Suilius) had been quaestor to Germanicus ; but Seneca
had stained the honour of that prince's house. Was it
worse to accept a fee for honourable work from a client
who was ready to give it, or to corrupt the virtue of royal
women ? Was it virtue and the maxims of philosophy
that taught him to accumulate so vast a fortune in
four years of Court favour ? At Rome he had drawn
in legacies as with a net ; the provinces were exhausted
by his usuries.

The language of the old accuser was reported
to Seneca v^ith exaggerations, and did not incline
him to indulgence. The trial was pressed on, and
conducted before the emperor himself. Suilius
pleaded that all he did was by order of Claudius,
but Nero interrupted him to say that he had
ascertained from his father's notes that no accusa-
tion had been commanded by him. Then Suilius
alleged the commands of Messalina, but was
asked why he alone was chosen to give his voice
and services to the tyrant ? In the end a part
of his goods was confiscated, and he himself
banished to the Balearic islands, where he is said
to have passed the remainder of his life in great
comfort. His son Nerulinus, who was shortly
afterwards prosecuted, was acquitted at the in-
stance of the emperor. Seneca has been charged
with vindictiveness on this occasion, yet if times
and circumstances are taken into account, we may
rather wonder at the mildness of the vengeance
which a powerful minister thought it sufficient to
exact from such an adversary.

CHAPTER VIII

the tragedy of baiae. institution of the

' juvenalia: 59

The power of Seneca, whose position had been
in some degree shaken by the attacks of Suilius,
was threatened at about the same time by a
more formidable antagonist. Poppaea Sabina,
beautiful, charming, nobly born, rich, and intelli-
gent, concealed beneath a modest exterior a cold
heart, a calculating disposition, and a total lack
of scruple. She was married to the brilliant and
dissipated Otho, one of the chief friends of Nero
and ornaments of his Court, after having been
divorced from a former husband, Crispinus. Otho,
whether from imprudence or ambition, vaunted
the charms of his wife to the emperor, and would
often, when about to rejoin her after dining at the
palace, describe in glowing terms the happiness
to which he was returning. The natural result
followed. Poppaea was presented to Nero, and at
first affected to be deeply smitten by his beauty
while awed by his greatness. But when the
emperor proceeded to make her his addresses
she changed her tone, spoke of her duty to Otho,
and contrasted that courtier's liberality and

THE TRAGEDY OF BAIAE 87

magnificence with the poorness of spirit shown
in Nero's devotion to Acte the freedwoman, with
whom she scorned to enter into competition.
Otho was banished from the Court and in some
danger of his Ufe, but finally Nero, through the
interposition of Seneca, sent him out as governor
to Lusitania, where, like Petronius in Bithynia, he
proved by the excellence of his administration
that his extravagance and debauchery in Rome
had been due rather to the lack of any more
rational cutlet for his activity than to a vicious
disposition. That he was capable of magnanimity
he showed in the last scene of his life ; and his
friendship for Seneca, of which Plutarch speaks,
stands to his credit.^

There were many complaints in this year of
the rapacity and injustice of the farmers of the
taxes ; and in consequence the total abolition
of customs duties was seriously debated in Nero's
Council. This drastic proposal having been
abandoned other measures were taken. In order
to secure that no more money should be raised
than was needed for public purposes, an edict was
issued that the nature of each tax and the principles
on which it was collected, which had hitherto
been kept secret, should be published by the
tax-gatherers, and that no demand should be
made later than a year after a tax had become
due. In the assessment of a merchant's posses-
sions for purposes of taxation, his ships were not

^ He remained for ten years governor of Lusitania, returning
in 68 for the stormy three months' reign which was ended by his
defeat and death. Tac. Ann. xiii. 45 ; Suet. Otho, 3.

88 SENECA

to be taken into account. Observance of these
excellent provisions did not long outlast the power
of Seneca and Burrhus.

The following year (59) brought with it the
definite emancipation of Nero, and the conse-
quent decline of good government. Although the
emperor hated his mother, although he exercised
his ingenuity to contrive mortifications for her
to the point of hiring bravoes to shout insults
from their boats as they sailed past her villa on
the Campanian coast, he could never overcome
the awe with which she inspired him, and when
she met him face to face she could always bend
him to submission. Agrippina was therefore an
obstacle to the ambitious designs of Poppaea,
who knew that while she lived Nero would never
dare to discard Octavia and marry herself.
Scandalous rumours were abroad and widely
credited, that Agrippina was endeavouring to
preserve her power by inviting her son to incest ;
while a minority declared that the horrible
suggestion proceeded from Nero himself. In any
case Acte, prompted by Seneca, brought these
rumours to the notice of the emperor, with the
intimation that if they gained credit among the
soldiers there would be a mutiny. Nero, greatly
alarmed and already moved by the persistent
taunts of Poppaea, resolved to rid himself of his
mother ; and, his first attempts to poison her having
been foiled by the precautionary measures of the
experienced empress, cast about for other means.

Anicetus, a freedman in command of the fleet
at Misenum and an enemy of Agrippina, suggested

THE TRAGEDY OF BAIAE 89

the expedient that was adopted. He offered to
supply a vessel so constructed that at a given
signal the roof of the principal cabin might
be made to fall in, and the ship itself to sink
through the opening of a hole in the bottom.
The contrivance being approved, Nero wrote a
letter to his mother couched in terms of humility
and submission, in which he prayed for a recon-
ciliation, and invited her to meet him at Baiae.
Agrippina went rejoicing, was received with
loving effusion, nobly entertained, placed above
her son at table, treated at first with the affection-
ate lightness, ease, and familiarity natural to a
young man in conversation with his mother, and
afterwards to her yet greater satisfaction gravely
consulted on matters of State, until the hour came
at last for her departure. Then Nero embraced
her with extraordinary warmth, and seemed un-
able to detach his gaze from her countenance.

It was a fine starlight night, and the sea was
calm when Agrippina went on board the gaily
decorated ship that had been prepared for her.
She was sitting in her cabin with a maid and
Gallus, one of her suite, when, soon after the ship
had left the harbour, part of the ceiling fell in
and crushed Gallus to death. The empress and
her attendant, Acerronia, however escaped all
hurt ; and, the mechanism through which a
leak was to have been simultaneously sprung
having failed to act, those of the sailors who
were in the secret endeavoured to capsize the
boat by bringing all weight to bear on one side.
Agrippina and Acerronia were thrown into the sea,

90 SENECA

where Acerronia either attempted to save herself
at her mistress's expense, or else her mistress
at her own — it must ever be doubtful which — by
crying out that she was the empress, and calling
for help for the emperor's mother. Thereupon
she was beaten to death by the oars of the sailors.
Agrippina swam for her life, and was rescued by a
boat from the shore. Returned to her villa, re-
flection on the circumstances convinced her both
that a crime had been attempted and that she
must conceal her suspicions. She therefore sent
a messenger to Nero to inform him of the grave
danger she had been in, and to relieve his anxiety
on her account by the assurance that, except for
a slight blow on the shoulder, she had sustained
no injury. She begged him not to come to her
for the present, though she knew his impulse
would be to come, for what she needed most of
all for her recovery was complete rest and quiet.

Nero was terrified by the news that his attempt
had failed. His guilty imagination pictured the
daughter of Germanicus full of rage, rousing the
soldiers, arming slaves, and proclaiming her
wrongs to Senate and people. He sent for Seneca
and Burrhus, told them all that had happened,
and asked their advice. They had none to give.
But Anicetus was not at the end of his resources.
He had already contrived to slip a dagger between
the feet of Agrippina's messenger while he was
performing his commission. The man was seized,
accused of having been sent by Agrippina to
assassinate the emperor, and promptly executed.
Anicetus now proposed to slay the empress in her

THE TRAGEDY OF BAIAE 91

villa, and to give oxit that she had destroyed
herself on hearing that her plot to take her
son's life had failed. Nero eagerly agreed to this
proposal, and the deed was done.

Matricide, even in the Rome of the first cen-
tury, was thought an enormous crime ; and Nero
dreaded the effect of the news on public opinion.
Had his first contrivance proved successful and
the death of Agrippina seemed the result of an
accident at sea, it had been his intention to express
sorrow for her loss and to honour her memory in
the customary manner with altars and temples.
As it was he knew not what to expect, and was
appalled by a sense of the magnitude of a crime
which, had it passed unsuspected by others, would
have probably given his seared conscience no
uneasiness. But the next morning he was en-
couraged by the flattery of the military officers,
who came at the suggestion of Burrhus, to con-
gratulate him on his escape from the dagger of
Agrippina's emissary. The neighbouring towns
of Campania followed suit by sending delegates
to felicitate the emperor and by offering sacrifices
of thanksgiving in their temples. Nero himself
affected, out of grief for his mother's loss, almost
to regret his own escape ; but he could no longer
endure the sight of Baiae and came to Naples, from
which place he sent a letter to the Senate composed
for him by Seneca. In this letter, after relating
how one of Agrippina's confidential freedmen
had been surprised in his presence armed with a
dagger, and how the empress on the miscarriage
of her attempt against his life had taken her own,

92 SENECA

he proceeded to an indictment of the whole of
his mother's career. He dwelt on the atrocities
of the reign of Claudius, and insinuated her re-
sponsibility for them ; he recalled her ambition
to be his colleague in the Empire and to receive
in his company the oath of allegiance ; and
asserted that on her failure to achieve this object
she had opposed all donatives to soldiers or people.
He was obliged, he added, to recognise, however
great his natural grief for her loss might be,
that her death was a public benefit.^ The letter
deceived nobody. No one could believe that
the wreck was an accident or that Agrippina
would have been mad enough to send a single
individual to attack the emperor in the midst of
his guards. The character of Nero was already
so well known that no fresh infamy on his part
could any longer cause surprise ; but the composi-
tion of the letter by Seneca was the subject of
hostile criticism, and was not only regarded at the
time by his enemies as an avowal of complicity
in the murder, but has weighed more heavily on
his memory ever since than any other incident
in his career. Yet that Seneca and Burrhus were
the accomplices or advisers of Nero's plot to
murder his mother is in a high degree improb-
able ; it is unlike all we know of their characters ;
and, as the event proved, such advice would have

^ In this letter occurred the ingenious phrase afterwards
quoted by QuintiUan as an example of a form of the senientia :
' Facit quasdam sententias sola geminatio : qualis est Senecae
in eo scripto quod Nero ad Senatum misit occisa matre, cum se
periclitatum videri vellet : " Salvum me esse adhuc nee credo
nee gaudeo " ' (Quint, viii. 5),

THE TRAGEDY OF BAIAE 93

been as unwise from the standpoint of their own
interests as wicked from every other. After the
deed had been done, Seneca probably convinced
himself that there was nothing better to do than
to make the best of a bad situation, and that if to
desert his post, to abandon Burrhus, and to leave
the Empire to the mercies of Nero would be an
unpatriotic course, the only alternative was, not
to condone the crime, but to deny that a crime
had been committed. ' What better proof can
a man give of devotion to virtue,' he wrote in
one of his letters, * than a readiness to sacrifice
reputation itself for conscience' sake ? ' ^ Yet when
all is said, the letter to the Senate remains of all
the recorded actions of Seneca the least defensible.
Nero might have spared himself anxiety with
regard to the Senate. The chief preoccupation
of that assembly at this crisis was to show the
unqualified nature of their submission to the
autocrat. Decrees were passed for thanksgivings
to the gods at every shrine ; for the annual cele-
bration of the day on which the supposed plot
had been frustrated ; and for the erection of a
golden statue to Minerva to be placed next to
that of the prince in the senate-house. Thrasea
Paetus, who up to that time had acquiesced in
silence or in a few formal words to decrees passed
in honour of Nero, refused further compliance and,
decHning to assent to these new compliments on
such an occasion, withdrew from the senate-house,
to which he but seldom returned. ' His action,'
observes Tacitus drily, ' though full of danger to

1 Ep. 81.

94 SENECA

himself was of no service to the cause of hberty.' *
Nor were the people to be outdone in their
manifestations of loyalty to the prince — a loyalty
which with them was not wholly feigned, for
Nero's lavish bounties, his shows, and popular
manners had made him a favourite with the mob,
while Agrippina, on the other hand, had been very
unpopular. When, therefore, after an unusually
long stay in Campania, he nerved himself to
return to Rome, he was received with an enthu-
siasm which far surpassed his most sanguine
hopes, and made a triumphant entry into the city.
This experience convinced him that he might do
what he would with impunity ; and from this
time forward he gave free play to the boundless
intemperance of his vicious will.

Nero was inordinately vain of his voice and of
his performances on the lute. That his musical
genius should be universally recognised was his
chief ambition, and he longed to appear on the
public stage there to win applause such as had
been given to no other performer. He was wont
to justify his passion for song and music by the
example of a god honoured not only in Greece
but in Rome, with whom the poets of his time
never wearied of comparing him.^ And song, he

* In making this remark the historian may have had in mind
his own contrasted conduct under the tyranny of Domitian,
during which he continued to attend the Senate and with bitter-
ness in his heart shared in all its degradation.

• Senec. Apoc. : ' lUe mihi similis vultu similisque decore.
Nee cantu nee voce minor.' Lucan, Phars. i. 48-50 : ' Seu te flam-
miferos Phoebi transcendere currus, Telluremque, nihil mutato
sole timentem, Igne vago lustrare juvat.' Cf. also eclogues in
Anthologia Latina of Riese, 725 and 726.

THE TRAGEDY OF BAIAE 95

would argue with some justice, is nothing without
an audience.^ But Phoebus was not only the
god of music, he was the charioteer of the sun ;
and here also he was followed by the emperor.
For Nero's second passion was the management
of horses in chariots ; his skill in which he was
almost as anxious to exhibit to the public as the
beauty of his voice. While, however, his mother
lived he shrank from degrading the majesty of the
Caesars by the self-exposure involved in public
exhibitions. He hated Agrippina, but he dreaded
her contempt.^

After the death of Agrippina, Seneca and
Burrhus found it impossible longer to resist the
prince's inclinations. In the hope, therefore, that
by a compromise they might satisfy his vanity
while averting a public scandal, they caused a
space of level ground at the foot of the Palatine
hill to be enclosed on which Nero might exhibit
his skill as a charioteer to a selected audience.
But vanity, like jealousy, is a passion that makes
the meat it feeds on ; and the only effect on Nero
of the applause of his friends was to make him
hunger for a larger circle of spectators. Barriers
were cast aside and the Roman people invited
to the spectacle. The populace, delighted to see

^ Suet. Nero, 20 : ' Jactans occultae musicae nullum esse
respectum.'

^ It has been thought remarkable, and a proof of their hard-
ness of heart, that the Romans were more shocked by Nero's stage
performances than by his cruelties or debaucheries. But if we
consider what would have been the effect in modern times on
the minds of their subjects of the appearance of a German or a
Russian emperor on the public stage of the opera in female
costume we shall feel less surprise.

96 SENECA

their emperor personally contributing to their
favourite amusement, were loud in their plaudits ;
while the ministers found to their distress that
in endeavouring to direct and control they had
only fanned the flame of Nero's folly. To cover
his shame he persuaded the hoblest youth of Rome
to follow his example, and rewarded with large
sums of money those of them whose poverty if
not their will consented.

But though Nero had performed before the
public as a charioteer, he did not as yet ven-
ture to appear in the theatre as a singer or
actor. For mimes, for all exhibitions of a
man's person or physical accomplishments with
a view to the public entertainment, the Romans
had a contempt unparalleled in any nation ancient
or modern. Self-exposure of any kind they
condemned as a violation of that pudor which
they ranked so high among the virtues. Nero
was a poet and musician as well as a singer. He
could sing his own poems to the accompaniment
of his own lyre and music of his own composition,
and he was resolved not to hide his talents. With
this end in view he instituted the juvenalia,
or festivals of the youth, to consist of musical
and dramatic performances. These were privately
celebrated from time to time in the emperor's
palace gardens, and were accompanied by much
profligacy and debauchery. They were attended
by the Court, together with men and women of
noble birth and of all ages, many of whom shared
in the performances. Here, for the first time,
Nero appeared on the boards in costume, lyre

THE TRAGEDY OF BAIAE 97

in hand, to sing songs which were greeted with
rapturous applause. A group of Roman knights,
taking the name of Augustani, formed them-
selves into a society, the sole object of which
was to applaud the emperor and to proclaim the
glory of the ' divine voice.' Burrhus himself,
with the officers of the guard, was reluctantly
obliged to be present and to join in the applause.^
As Tacitus makes no mention of Seneca in this
connection, we may perhaps infer that the
philosopher excused himself from attendance.

1 Ann. xiv. 15 : ' Centuriones tribunique et maerens Burrhus
et laudans.'

H

CHAPTER IX

DECLINE OF SENECA's INFLUENCE— DEATH
OF BURRHUS AND OF OCTAVIA, A.D. 60-62

In spite of Nero's growing self-confidence and
impatience of control, his aversion from business
secured two more years of relatively wise and
humane administration to Rome after the death
of Agrippina. Until his vanity, that ' insatiate
cormorant,' had consumed the vast resources
left for its satisfaction by the economies of his
predecessor, he was under no temptation to
resort to oppression for its further supply. The
law of majestas had been suffered to become
obsolete ; informers had been discouraged ;
governors of provinces had been made to give a
strict account of their stewardship, and punished
when they deserved it ; and the popularity which
these wise measures of his ministers brought
to the prince was more than doubled by the
extravagance of his shows and his lavish dis-
tributions of presents to the people.

The chief event at Rome of the year 60 was
the solemn institution by Nero of quinquennial
games, consisting of gymnastic and musical con-
tests, and also of chariot racing — destined to be

DECLINE OF SENECA'S INFLUENCE 99

continued at intervals of five years for centuries.
A festival of this kind, copied from a Greek model,
was a novelty to the Romans, who had been ac-
customed to profess a singular contempt for the
athletic and artistic achievements held in such
honour by the Greeks.^ There were mutterings
from conservatives, who deplored the State
encouragement of Greek accomplishments un-
worthy of Romans ; but these were answered by
the upholders of modern ideas, who dwelt on the
relief to the magistrates, ruined by the expense
of the shows they were obliged to provide for the
people out of their private means, when a part of
this expense should be defrayed from the public
purse ; and also on the stimulus to intellectual
activity which the prizes at these contests for
poetry and eloquence would supply. The first
celebration of the Neronia, as the games were
called, was decently conducted. The prize for
eloquence was not competed for but formally
allotted to Nero.

The following year (61) was rendered memor-
able by the disaster in Britain, where 70,000
Romans are said to have been massacred in a
sudden rising of the inhabitants under their warrior
queen, Boadicea. The rising was suppressed by
the energy and ability of the governor, Suetonius
Paullinus. Nero had no liking for successful
commanders, and Suetonius was rewarded for
his victory by his recall.

1 Lucan, vii. 270: ' Graiis delecta juventus Gymnasiis aderit,
studioque ignava palaestrae.' Tac, Ann. xiv. 20 : ' Degener-
etque studiis externis juventus, gymnasia et otia et turpes am ores
exercendo, Principe et Senatu auctoribus.'

100 SENECA

In Rome the event of the year which excited
the greatest interest was the murder of Pedanius
Secundus, prefect of the city, by one of his own
slaves, because of the demand which followed it
for the enforcement of the old law under which
when a master was killed by a slave all the other
slaves of the household as well as himself were
put to death. The people had grown accustomed
to a milder regime, and the proposed punishment
of so large a number of their fellow-men of both
sexes and of every age nearly caused a revolt.
Even in the Senate a minority protested against
the application of so severe a law. The writings
of Seneca, the most widely read author of the day,
in which he pleaded the cause of slaves, insisted
on their common humanity, called them ' humble
friends ' and fellow-servants of fortune, and
laughed at those who held it degrading to sit
at table in their company, may have had some
effect on public opinion. ^ Tacitus has preserved
for us a speech made in the Senate by one
Caius Cassius, in which we have the judgment of
a Roman senator of the old school on the new
ideas, full of false sentiment and degenerate soft-
ness as he would think them, which found their
leading exponent in the treatises of Seneca :—

I have very often been present, Patres Conscripti,
in this assembly when proposals have been made

1 Ep. 47 : ' Servi sunt ? imo homines. Servi sunt ? imo con-
tubernales. Servi sunt ? imo humiles amici. Servi sunt ? imo
conservi, si cogitaveris tantundem in utrosque licere fortunae.
Itaque rideo istos qui tvirpe existimant cum servo suo coenare :
quare ? nisi quia superbissima consuetude coenanti domino
stantium servorum turbam circumdedit.'

DECLINE OF SENECA'S INFLUENCE loi

contrary to the laws and institutions of our ancestors,
and I have raised no opposition. This was not because
I doubted at any time the wisdom and right policy of
our ancient institutions, or supposed they could be
altered except for the worse ; but, in the first place,
because I would not in my zeal for the old order appear
to attach too much importance to my own opinion ;
and, in the second place, because a continual course of
opposition in matters of lesser moment is apt to weaken
the force of our resistance at times when the highest
interests of the commonwealth are threatened. Consider
what has just happened, A man of consular rank has
been killed in his own house by a treacherous slave.
No one interfered to save him or revealed the plot,
and that although the law under which the whole family
became responsible for his safety had not yet been called
into question. Pass then, in the name of heaven, your
act of indemnity. Whose rank will protect him when
the prefecture of the city is of no avail ? How many
slaves shall we need for our defence when four hundred
could not secure the safety of Pedanius ? . , . Some
there are who are not ashamed to pretend that the
assassin was avenging the wrongs he had suffered
because he was himself being robbed. Let us say at
once, then, that Pedanius was justly slain ! Would you
have me find arguments for enforcing a law established
long ago by wiser men than we ? Well, then, I will
suppose that it is a question of passing it for the first
time, and I ask you whether it is credible that a slave
should have formed the intention of kiUing his master
and given no hint to any of his design by a single rash
or threatening word ? He concealed his plot very suc-
cessfully forsooth ; no one saw his weapon ; he passed
the guard ; he opened the doors of the bed-chamber ;
he passed in bearing a torch ; he committed the murder ;
and no one was aware of what he was doing ! It is im-
possible. , , . Our ancestors mistrusted the disposition
of slaves, even when born in their own houses or on their
estates and therefore bound to them by lifelong ties

102 SENECA

of affection and gratitude. But now when households
are made up from distant nations, when we have slaves
whose manners and religion differ so widely from our
own, we can certainly never keep this vile multitude in
order except by working on their fears. The innocent,
it is said, will perish with the guilty. Why, so they do
in a defeated army, when every tenth man is beaten
to death ; the lot may fall on the brave. Something
of injustice you will find in every great example ; but
the interests of individuals must be sacrificed to the
general good.

No senator was bold enough openly to oppose
the views of Cassius, and, though dissentient
murmurs were heard condemning the mockery of
justice that took neither sex nor age nor patent
innocence into account, it was resolved that the
law should be enforced. Riots ensued among the
populace, and a threat of resistance was uttered.
Thereupon the imperial displeasure was pro-
claimed by edict, the road from the prison to
the place of execution was lined with soldiers,
and the four hundred slaves, men, women, and
children, were put to death.

The year 62 opened ominously with the revival
of the law of majestas, or treason, which had
lain dormant since the death of Claudius. At a
banquet given at the house of Ostorius Scapula
the praetor Antistius, one of the guests, recited
some scurrilous verses of his own composition
against the emperor. Cossutius Capito, who had
been raised to senatorial rank by the influence
of his father-in-law, Tigellinus, accused Antistius
of treason before the Senate. Ostorius declared
that he had heard no verses recited, but credit

DECLINE OF SENECA'S INFLUENCE 103

was given to the evidence of other witnesses, and
Junius MaruUus, consul designate, moved that
Antistius should be deprived of his praetorship
and put to death in the ancient fashion. But
Thrasea Paetus rose to oppose this motion, and,
after much praise of Caesar and reproaches
addressed to Antistius, declared that savage
punishments such as that demanded belonged
to another age, and that the laws allowed the
adoption of milder alternatives. He therefore
moved that Antistius should be punished by the
confiscation of his property and banishment to
an island. This motion was carried on a division ;
but, before venturing to give effect to it, the consuls
thought it prudent to ask counsel of the emperor.
Nero, offended and embarrassed, replied that he
had been attacked without a cause by Antistius,
who certainly deserved to be punished. For
the rest, had the Senate decided on the severer
penalty, he should have interfered to prevent its
infliction, but he could make no objection to their
moderation. Indeed, they might acquit the
prisoner altogether if they so pleased. In spite
of the manifest annoyance of the emperor, the
Senate did not recede from their vote ; some of
them, says Tacitus, in order not to expose the
prince to unpopularity, others perceiving safety
in numbers, and Thrasea out of his natural great-
ness of soul. This was perhaps the last occasion
during Nero's reign on which the Senate showed
independence.

The death of Burrhus, which soon followed,
dealt a shattering blow to Seneca's power and

104 SENECA

influence for good. It is to the credit of both men
that the friendship and union between them had
remained throughout unbroken by any sentiment
of rivalry or jealousy ; and, while the military
force was under the command of Burrhus, Nero
did not venture to rid himself of Seneca. Burrhus
was succeeded in the command of the Praetorians
by Tigellinus, the most profligate and corrupt of
Nero's associates, with whom as a concession to
public opinion was joined as a colleague Fenius
Rufus — an honest man, liked by the soldiers
and respected by the people on account of the
integrity with which he had administered the
distribution of corn. But Rufus was given no
real power, while Tigellinus, on the other hand,
who had cultivated a good understanding with
Poppaea, acquired a predominant influence over
the emperor, whose worst impulses he encouraged.
After the death of Burrhus the enemies of
Seneca redoubled their attacks, to which they per-
ceived that the emperor was beginning to listen with
scarcely veiled satisfaction. With the exaggera-
tion customary in all ages when the fortunes of
public men are in question, they dwelt on the
extent of his revenues too vast for a subject, the
number of his villas, and the beauty of his gardens,
almost surpassing in magnificence, so they said,
those of the emperor himself. They accused
him, probably with more justice, of depreciating
Nero's skill as a charioteer, and of openly derid-
ing the celestial voice. They insinuated that he
claimed a monopoly of eloquence, that so soon
as Nero had begun to write poetry his own poetical

DECLINE OF SENECA'S INFLUENCE 105

activity had been found to increase, and that, in
fact, he would allow nothing of eloquence to
appear in the republic that did not proceed from
himself. Nero, they said, had passed his child-
hood ; let him shake off his yoke, and show that
he needed no other guidance than that supplied
him by the example of his ancestors.

The appointment of Tigellinus to the post of
Burrhus convinced Seneca that he could be of no
further service to the State, and he became anxious
to retire from public life. But it was no easy
matter to withdraw from the service of the
suspicious Nero. Seneca himself in one of his
letters, with the worldly wisdom which he
commonly blends with his philosophy, observed
that it is dangerous to seem to seek a safe retreat,
since a man implicitly condemns that which he
shuns. ^ However, he obtained an audience, and on
the plea of age and growing infirmities begged to
be allowed to retire from the Court and devote
the short remainder of his life to his studies.
At the same time he entreated the prince to
come to his assistance by allowing him to restore
to his imperial benefactor the great possessions
which he owed to his munificence. But Nero
would not accept his resignation or the proffered
sacrifice of his gardens and villas. He pro-
fessed the highest value for the services of his
minister, loaded him with caresses, and dis-
missed him with tender reproaches that he

* Ep. xiv. : ' Sapiens nocituram potentiam vitat, hoc primum
cavens, ne vitare videatur. Pars enim securitatis et in hoc est,
non ex professo earn petere ; quia quae quis fugit damnat.'

10 6 SENFXA

should be content to gain credit for disinterested-
ness at the risk of exposing his friend to the
suspicion of avarice, and that he should desire
a retirement which would be interpreted as fear
of Nero's cruelty. Seneca thanked the prince and
withdrew ; but from that time forth changed
his whole manner of life ; discontinued his re-
ceptions of clients, spent little time abroad and
avoided all society, devoting himself in seclusion
to his studies, and writing his immortal letters to
Lucilius. The change in the direction of affairs
soon made itself felt . Burrhus, Tigellinus told Nero,
had other interests ; but for himself, the emperor's
safety was the one object. He endeavoured to
alarm Nero with reports of conspiracies, and to
plunge him into crime in order to secure his own
position as an indispensable guardian and accom-
plice. Rubellius Plautus and Cornelius Sulla were
the first victims of this system. Plautus was a
descendant through his mother of Augustus.
He had adopted Stoic principles and, though a
man of vast possessions, the simplicity and dignity
of his domestic life had won him universal respect.
Two years previously, in the year 6i, when the
appearance of a comet, a slight illness of the
emperor, and other signs had made many people
believe that a change was imminent, he had
been spoken of as a candidate for the Empire-
Thereupon Nero had sent him a letter in which
he suggested that, in order to silence these invidious
reports for which he did not hold him responsible,
it might be well that he should retire for a time
to his ancestral estates in the province of Asia,

DECLINE OF SENECA'S INFLUENCE 107

and there live out his youth free from danger or

intrigue. Plautus compHed, and was still living

in the province when the death of Burrhus and

the partial retirement of Seneca brought Tigellinus

into power. Cornelius Sulla, a dull man, whose

only importance was derived from his descent

from the dictator, had been living in exile at

Marseilles since the year 58, whither he had

been sent on a trumped-up accusation of a plot

against the emperor, of which no one who knew

his indolent disposition believed him to be capable.

Tigellinus, closely studying the humours of

his master, discovered that these two men were

the living fears in Nero's heart, and thereupon

urged, as from himself, their destruction. Nero

at once agreed, and on the sixth day after

emissaries sent for the purpose had left Rome,

Sulla was assassinated while dining at Marseilles

and his head brought back to the emperor, who

laughed at the premature whiteness of the hair

on it. The execution of Plautus was a more

dangerous business. Unlike Sulla, he had many

friends and great possessions. He was warned of

his danger by a despatch from his father-in-law,

Antistius, who urged him to resistance. But

Plautus was a Stoic philosopher and a fatalist,

and he thought the doubtful chance of a longer

life not worth the struggle, while he hoped that

his submission might incline the emperor to a

better treatment of his wife and children. Nero's

assassin found him at noon stripped for the

exercises of his gymnasium. Here he was slain,

and his head, like that of Sulla, brought back to

io8 SENECA

the exulting tyrant. An imperial message to the
Senate made no direct mention of the deaths of
Plautus and Sulla, but spoke vaguely of their
factious disposition and the emperor's constant
watchfulness over the public safety. They were
thereupon expelled from the Senate and the usual
supplications decreed.

These crimes were followed by the murder
of the innocent and unhappy Octavia. This
princess, whose brief life had been but one series
of calamities unredeemed by a single gleam of
happiness, was adored by the people, who com-
miserated her misfortunes and detested her rival
Poppaea. Nero began by divorcing her on the
ground of sterility, and removed her first to
a house once inhabited by Burrhus and after-
wards into Campania, where she was placed under
a military guard. She was next charged with
adultery with an Egyptian slave ; but the heroic
constancy of her waiting-maids, who continued
under torture to declare her innocence, made it
necessary to abandon this charge, and the emperor,
intimidated by popular clamour, decided to re-
call her. Great rejoicings followed ; the statues
of Poppaea were thrown down, and those of
Octavia adorned with flowers. The multitude
advanced towards the palace to express their
gratitude to the emperor, but they were met by
a charge from the soldiers and dispersed with
bloodshed. Poppaea, assisted by Tigellinus, used
all her wiles to restore Nero's resolution and to
compass the ruin of Octavia. The services of
Anicetus, the murderer of Agrippina, were again

DECLINE OF SENECA'S INFLUENCE 109

called into requisition. This man had become
odious to Nero, on the principle that ' they love
not poison that do poison need,' and was ready
for any new crime to recover his favour. He
agreed to accuse himself of being the lover of
Octavia, and exceeded his instructions in the
shamelessness of his pretended disclosures. After
his statement made to Nero's council he was
removed to Sardinia, and there enabled to spend
the remaining years of his miserable life in physical
comfort. Octavia, still but in her twentieth year,
having witnessed the murders of her father and
brother by a husband who had hated and cruelly
treated her from the first day of their pretended
union, was now confined in fetters in the island
of Pandataria, and after a few days put to death.
Her head was brought to her cruel rival, Poppaea,
whose marriage to Nero had immediately followed
the divorce.

In the following year (63) Poppaea gave birth
to a daughter, and Nero was beside himself with
joy. The Senate fell in with his mood and
voted temples, thanksgivings to the gods, and
honours to the child and mother, with their
customary subservience. The child was born
at Antium — Nero's own birthplace — and thither
the senators went to offer their congratulations —
all except Thrasea, whose absence drew a bitter
comment from the emperor. Afterwards Nero
boasted to Seneca that he had reconciled himself
to Thrasea. A flatterer would have replied with
the anticipated protest against such an excess of
magnanimity, but Seneca merely expressed himself

no SENECA

delighted at the news and offered his congratu-
lations— a reply, comments Tacitus, much to his
honour and to that of Thrasea, but fraught with
peril to both these excellent men. The child
itself died in four months' time and Nero, excessive
in all things, abandoned himself to the wildest
manifestations of grief, which the divine honours
voted to his lost treasure by a sympathetic Senate
were powerless to assuage.

CHAPTER X

SENECA IN RETIREMENT— HIS FRIENDS
AND OCCUPATIONS

During the last three years of his Hfe Seneca
occupied himself as little as he could with public
affairs. The emperor would not consent to his
formal retreat, and still occasionally consulted
him, but he lived at Rome as little as possible,
making his health an excuse for spending most
of his time in one or other of his villas. In his
retirement, which he shared with his young wife
Paullina, to whom he was tenderly attached,
Seneca occupied himself with reading, writing,
self-examination, meditation on the nature of
things, and researches into natural history. His
book of Naturales Quaestiones, written in the
last year of his life, was the result of these re-
searches in which, says Quintilian, he was some-
times misled by those whom he employed to
make investigations. This book, though without
scientific value, assumes the existence of natural
causes for all phenomena however unusual,
and rejects the notion that they were special

112 SENECA

indications of the divine purpose, or bore any but
accidental relation to human destiny.^

Seneca was also an expert vine-grower, and his
vineyard at Nomentum was the admiration of
Itahan agriculturists.^ The territory of Nomentum,
a small and ancient town in the neighbourhood
of Rome, was celebrated for its vineyards. A
new system of cultivation had been introduced
there with very successful results by a freed-
man named Acilius Sthenelus. The methods
of Sthenelus were imitated by the well-known
grammarian Palaemon, a man of infamous morals
and inordinate vanity, but whose energy and
ability had raised him from the condition of a
slave to wealth and high distinction in his
profession.^ Palaemon bought at a low price
some neglected land at Nomentum, and set to
work to grow vines on it according to the system
of Sthenelus. He succeeded so well that within
eight years his vineyards had become an object
of interest to all men engaged in vine-growing,
and the proximity of Nomentum to Rome brought
him a stream of visitors by which his vanity —

1 Nat. Quaest. vi. 3 : ' lUud quoque proderit praesumere animo,
nihil horum deos facere ; nee ira numinum, aut caelum concuti,
aut terram. Suas ista causas habent : nee ex imperio saeviunt,
sed ex quibusdam vitiis, ut corpora nostra, turbantur : et tunc,
cum facere videntur, injuriam accipiunt.'

* Nat. Quaest. iii. 7 : ' Ego tibi vinearum diligens fossor
af&rmo.' Pliny, xiv. 4 : ' Annaeo Seneca . . . tanto praedii
ejus amore capto, ut non puderet inviso alias et ostentaturo
tradere palmam eam, emptis quadruplicato vineis illis intra
decennium fere curae annum.' Columella, iii. 3.

' Nevertheless, in the expressed opinion of both the emperors
Tiberius and Claudius his moral character unfitted him to be
placed in charge of youth.

SENECA IN RETIREMENT 113

the leading motive, according to Pliny, of all his
activities — must have been abundantly gratified.
Among the rest came Seneca, who was so charmed
with what he saw that he purchased the property
at a price four times as large as that which Palaemon
had paid for it less than ten years previously.
The farm did not suffer from the change of owner-
ship. Columella, a contemporary, writes that
in his time the vineyards of Nomentum were
celebrated for their excellence, and that the best
yield of all was from that belonging to Seneca.^

The practical character of Seneca's philosophy,
his love of tangible results, his constant desire
to penetrate through appearances to realities,
render comprehensible his taste for agriculture.
A rival vine-grower, mentioned by Pliny, was
Vetalinus Aegialus, by origin a freedman, who
lived on an estate in the district of Liternum, in
Campania, formerly occupied by Scipio Africanus
during his exile from Rome. Seneca visited him
there, and has left in one of his letters an interest-
ing description of the house and olive plantations,
with a detailed account of the various methods
of planting and transplanting olive-trees and
vines :

I am writing you [Lucilius] this letter from the actual
house of Scipio Africanus, where I am staying, and where
I have adored his ' manes ' and the cofhn which I beheve
to contain the body of that great man ... I find a
house constructed of square stones, in a wood, surrounded

1 Colum., De re rustica, iii. 3 : ' Nomentana regio celeberrima
fama est illustris, et praecipue quam possidet Seneca, vir ex-
cellentis ingenii atque doctrinae, cujus in praediis vinearum jugera
singula cuUeos octonos reddidisse plerumque compertum est.'

I

114 SENECA

by a wall, with towers erected at each corner for its
defence. There is a tank to supply the buildings and the
plants which might suffice for the wants of a whole army.
The small bath is rather dark, as we generally find in
baths of that time. It gave me great pleasure to con-
template Scipio's way of Uving and to contrast it with
ours. It was in this dark corner that the terror of
Carthage, to whom Rome owes it that she was captured
only once, used to bathe his body wearied with country
work, for his exercise took the form of labour, and he
used to plough his fields himself, after the manner of
the ancients. Under this humble roof he hved ; on
this common pavement he walked. Who now would
endure to bathe in this manner ? A man now thinks
himself poor and mean unless his walls glisten with
large and costly marble, with Alexandrian blocks con-
trasting with Numidian, with elaborate texture of mosaic
as from a painter's hand ; unless his arched roof is
hidden by plate glass ; unless marble from Thasos, once
the rare and conspicuous decoration of some temple,
cover the walls of a swimming-bath into which he plunges
a body exhausted by profuse perspiration ; unless water
flows from silver sluices. And I am speaking only of
common baths ; what shall be said when we come to the
baths of freedmen, with their many statues, and columns
supporting nothing but placed there merely for show, and
by reason of their costUness ? What of the sound of waters
rushing down the steps ? Our luxury has reached such
a pitch that the very floor on which we tread must be
set with precious stones. In this bath of Scipio there
are chinks, hardly to be called windows, cut in the stone
wall, so that light may be admitted without weaken-
ing the defences. But nowadays we think baths musty
unless they are contrived so as to admit the full rays
of the sun to fall through vast windows upon the bathers
and warm them as they bathe, and to enable them to
enjoy from their seats a prospect of sea and land. New
inventions of luxury constantly outstrip the old, and
every novelty which made baths admired and run after

SENECA IN RETIREMENT 115

at the time of their dedication soon becomes out of
date and out of fashion. Of old, baths were few and
their arrangements simple, for there was little need for
decoration when the object of bathing was cleanliness,
not pleasure, and when a bath cost less than a penny.
Water was not poured over the bather, nor constantly
renewed as from a hot spring to clean the grease from
shining bodies. But, by Heaven, it was delightful to
enter those dark bathing-places when you knew that
a Cato or a Fabius Maximus or one of the Cornelii had
tested the water with his own hands, for the office of
inspecting the public baths, of seeing that they were
clean and in good order, and that the temperature was
kept at the right and most healthy level, was in old
days discharged by the noblest aediles. . . . What a
clown would Scipio now be thought, who had no broad
window-panes through which to admit the Hght and
was not accustomed to stew in a steaming bath under
the full sunshine I The water in which he bathed was
not filtered, but often cloudy, indeed after heavy rain
almost muddy. But that mattered little to him, for
he came to wash away sweat, not ointment. One can
imagine the contemptuous comment : ' We do not
envy Scipio if that was his manner of bathing.' But
there is worse to come ; he did not bathe every day,
for we are told by the recorders of old customs that our
ancestors washed their legs and arms every day because
they were stained by their work, but their whole bodies
only once a week. ' Clearly they were very dirty fellows '
someone will say. Of what do you think they smelt ?
Of warfare ; of labour ; of manhood. Men became
fouler after elegant baths were invented. ... To use
ointment is of no use unless it is renewed twice or thrice
a day, otherwise it will evaporate. People glory in
these odours, as if they were natural to their bodies.
If all this seems to you too severe you must ascribe it
to the spirit of the house, where I have been learning
from Aegialus, the present owner of the estate and
the most industrious of householders, how to trans-

ii6 SENECA

plant an old plantation. This is the sort of thing we
veterans should learn, we are all of us planting olive
yards for the benefit of those who come after us.^

In another letter he describes how, when
attacked by fever, he escaped from Rome to
Nomentum, disregarding the anxious remon-
strances of Paullina, his second wife, who thought
him too ill to move, and how quickly the sight
of his vines and meadows, and the enjoyment
of pure air after the fetid atmosphere of the
city, restored him to health. In this letter, too,
he dwells with gratitude on the devoted affection
of Paullina, and says that it was this that
reconciled him to life. His health had become
a matter of concern to himself, because it was a
matter of concern to her.

For since I know that I am to her as the breath of
life, I begin to be careful of myself that I may be careful
of her, and I give up that indifference to fate which
is the chief boon brought by old age. This old man,
I tell myself, has youth in his keeping and must there-
fore spare himself. ... It is sweet, moreover, to be so
dear to a wife that a man becomes dearer to himself.''

Another villa owned by Seneca in the neigh-
bourhood of Rome was in the Alban district,
where many rich Romans possessed houses and
whither the emperors themselves used to resort to
their magnificent villa first occupied by Pompey,
large remains of which are still visible at Albano.
Seneca gives in one of his letters a characteristic
account of a surprise visit he paid to his Alban
villa about this time. He relates how he arrived

' Ep. 86. =» Ep. 104.

SENECA IN RETIREMENT 117

late at night after a troublesome journey and found
nothing ready for his reception but the contented
mind he brought with him. This he owed, so he
writes, to the reflections that nothing external
really matters if you take it lightly ; that all that
is displeasing in our indignation arises from the
feeling itself, not from its subject; that evil resides
not in things, but in the opinion we have of them ;
and that although there was no bread in the
house but the coarse stuff eaten by his bailiff and
labourers, he would find, if he waited long enough
to be hungry, that this was better than the bread
to which he was accustomed. Amusing himself
with these philosophical meditations he went
supperless to bed, and determined to eat no scrap
till his appetite should clamour for the homely
fare within his reach and he could digest it with
pleasure. A stomach well-disciplined and trained
to put up with indignities, he moralised the next
morning to Lucilius, is of the greatest use to one
who would be free. He is delighted to find with
what perfect unconcern he can endure unexpected
inconveniences ; for, as he remarks, a man if
given time can brace himself to do without many
things, the sudden loss of which he would feel.

We do not understand how many of the things we
use are superfluous till we begin to dispense \^dth them.
Then we find that we made use of them merely because
we possessed them. With how many things we surround
ourselves only because others have done the same, be-
cause it is the fashion ! A fruitful source of our errors
is that we live by imitation and are guided by custom
rather than by reason. When a practice of any kind

Ii8 SENECA

is adopted but by a few we leave it alone, when more
people take to it we follow suit, just as if it were better
because more common, and when some extravagance
becomes general we begin to think it right. For in-
stance, no man of fashion cares to make a journey with-
out being preceded by an escort of Numidian outriders
and runners. He would despise himself if the road
were not cleared for his passage and unless a great
dust heralded the approach of a person of consequence,
while the accoutrements of his mules must be of precious
material wrought by great artists.

He goes on to warn Lucilius to avoid the insi-
dious society of those who declare virtue and jus-
tice and philosophy to be empty names, and that
to take pleasure as it flies is the only sensible course
for an ephemeral being like man. Death, these
say, will take all ; why then anticipate its action
by the surrender of what it will take? What
madness to act as steward for your heir and so
make him long for your departure, because the
more you have the better pleased will he be to
see you go. Reputation is a bubble, pleasure the
one reality. Such siren-songs as these, says
Seneca, must be shunned like the plague. They
turn us from our country, from our parents, from
our friends, from virtue, and dash us to pieces
on a rock of degradation. No one is good by
accident ; virtue is a difficult science and must
be learnt. Pleasure, which we share with the
animals, which attracts the meanest of created
things, must be a petty and contemptible thing.
Poverty is an evil only to him who declines it.
Superstition is very madness ; it fears those
whom it should love ; it dishonours those whom

SENECA IN RETIREMENT 119

it worships. As well deny the existence of gods
as report so vilely of their character. There
is no hope for the sick man whom his physician
urges to intemperance.^

One fruit of retirement, especially to Seneca's
taste, was the increased opportunities which it
brought him of intercourse with his friends.
Throughout his life he had cultivated friendship
with chosen men of every rank, and he had a
high idea of all that was implied in the term.

Consider long [he writes] before admitting a man to
be your friend, but when you have done so, admit him
to your heart of hearts, speak as freely to him as to
yourself. Do you indeed so live as to entrust nothing
to yourself which you would be ashamed to confide even
to an enemy ; yet since there are things which we are
accustomed to keep secret, share with your friend all
your cares, all your thoughts. If you think him faithful
you will make him so.^

The wise man, even if sufficient unto himself, wishes
to have a friend ; if on no other account yet that he
may practise friendship , . . not for the reasons Epicurus
gives, that he may have someone to nurse him when
ill or to succour him when in prison or in want, but that
he may himself have someone to nurse, or to liberate
when a prisoner. He who regards himself and for his
own sake seeks for friendship is in error ; as it has begun,
so will it end. He has prepared a friend to bring him
aid when in chains, at the first clank that friend will
leave him. . . . You begin a friendship for your own
advantage, if a greater advantage offers you will break
it, because you have looked for a reward outside itself.
Wherefore do I make myself a friend ? To have one
for whom I can die, whom I can follow into exile, for
whose life I may risk and spend my own.^

1 Ep. 123. » Ep. 3. * Ep. 9.

120 SENECA

Friendship [he writes to Lucilius] makes all things
common between us, neither prosperity nor adversity
can fall to our single share. We live in common. No
one can live happily who looks to himself alone, who
turns everything to his own profit ; you must live for
another if you would live for yourself — ' alteri vivas
oportet, si vis iibi vivere.' The binding union which
mingles all with all and claims that there are rights
common to the whole human race must be carefully
and sacredly observed. To this end the cultivation
of that tie of intimate friendship I spoke of is of the
greatest service, for he who shares all things with his
friend will share much with mankind.^

The soul knows no pleasure comparable to a sweet
and faithful friendship. How good it is to have one to
whom you can confide every secret, whose knowledge
you fear less than your own, whose conversation soothes
your cares, whose judgment solves your perplexities,
whose cheerfulness drives away melancholy, whose very
sight enchants you.^

In spite of, perhaps owing to, this lofty notion
of friendship, Seneca had a goodly list of friends.
Nearest of all to his heart was Annaeus Serenus,
captain of Nero's bodyguard, whose name suggests
that he may have been a relation. To him he
addressed the treatise De Constantia Sapientis ;
and the De Tranquillitate Animi is in the
form of a dialogue between Serenus and himself.
The younger man is made to consult Seneca with
respect to certain difficulties which he has en-
countered in his progress in philosophy. His
reason has convinced him that a simple life is the
best, and his real inclinations agree with his
reason. Yet he finds his eyes dazzled by the

' Ep. 48. * De Tranquill. Anim. i. 7.

SENECA IN RETIREMENT 121

splendour he sees around him ; and he is conscious
of an occasional conflict between his moral and
physical nature, troubling him much as sea-sickness
may trouble a man though the ship is in no danger.
These weaknesses humiliate and disturb him, and
he asks Seneca to prescribe some means by which
he may gain a constant and invulnerable tran-
quillity of soul. Seneca in reply treats, as he
says, the whole question in order that from the
general remedy Serenus may extract what he
needs to meet his own case. His remedy, in
brief, is self-devotion to the welfare of others,
whether by public service of the State, in which a
man must regard honours only so far as they
may help him to be useful to his friends, to his
fellow-citizens, and to the whole world ; or, if
the temptations incident to such a life may not
safely be confronted, to the equally necessary
work of teaching the world the meaning of justice,
of piety, of patience, of fortitude, of the contempt
of death, of the nature of the gods, and finally,
what all may have who will, of a good conscience.
We have no power over fortune. Life is in one
sense a perpetual servitude, whatever its out-
ward aspect ; but we have power to act rightly,
however fortune may treat us, and there are no
conceivable circumstances in which we may not
secure tranquillity by serving our fellow-creatures
in the measure of our power. A discriminating
choice of friends, moderation in all things, with a
rational end kept constantly in view in all our
actions and desires, the elimination of the super-
fluous, the a\ oidance alike of anxiety and of frivolity,

122 SENECA

achieved by constantly keeping in mind the truth
that external things being beyond our power
and subject to fortune are unimportant, to laugh
rather than weep at the follies and vices of the
multitude, recreation, and the cultivation of
cheerfulness — these are the more worldly-wise
counsels addressed to Serenus personally with
which Seneca closes his treatise. It was written
during the Quinquennium, at the height of his
prosperity, and is free from the gloom, the sense
of impending tragedy, the passionate exhortations
to constanc}^ the tremendous seriousness which
mark his later writings when the reign of terror
had begun.

Serenus died while still young of a dish of
poisonous fungi.^ Of his grief at this event Seneca
afterwards wrote to Lucilius, whom he was con-
soling for the loss of a friend :

Though I write thus to you, yet I myself mourned
for my dearest friend Annaeus Serenus with such ex-
travagance of lamentation that I am become a name
among those who have been vanquished by sorrow — the
last thing I desired. Now, however, I blame myself, and
perceive that the chief reason of my excess of grief was
that I had never thought that he could have died before
me. I only reflected that he was younger, and much
younger — as if the Fates preserved the order of age.^

Another of Seneca's friends of a very different
sort was Demetrius, the cynic philosopher. Deme-
trius was a native of Sunium, and early in his
long life became known for the originahty and
independence of his character. He illustrated

^ Pliny, xxii. * Ep. 63.

SENECA IN RETIREMENT 123

the doctrines of his school no less by his life
than by his teaching. Confining his wants to the
barest necessities, living on the roughest fare,
clad in the coarsest garments, he was in need of
nothing that man could give him, and therefore
had no motive for concealing his opinions on
life or on the actions of mankind out of any
human respect. Seneca, at the summit of his
fame and power and wealth, retained the highest
admiration and regard for this half-naked
champion of poverty and of contempt for the
world's goods.

Nature [he says] would seem to have bred him
(Demetrius) in our times in order to show that neither
could we corrupt him, nor he correct us. He is,
though he deny it, a perfectly wise man ; one whose
constancy of resolution nothing can shake ; whose un-
laboured eloquence following its natural course and intent
on its end is little concerned with the choice of words
or the modulation of periods, but is exactly suited to
the great subjects it treats, and the true expression of
a mighty soul. Providence, I am persuaded, has decreed
that the man should lead such a life, and has endowed
him with such powers of speech, that this age might lack
neither an example nor a reproach.^

The teaching of Demetrius was that of his
school, but confirmed in his instance by an
unchanging practice.

The wise man [he taught] must despise whatever is
subject to fortune, must raise himself above fear, and
learn to attach no value to riches save those that spring
from himself, remembering always that there is little to
fear from men, and nothing from the goodness of the gods ;

* De Benef. vii. 8.

124 SENECA

he must disdain all those superfluities that torment
while they seem to adorn our lives, and understand that
death is the source of no evil but the end of many ;
consecrating his soul to virtue he must think her way
the plainest whithersoever it may lead him ; he must
hold himself a social being born for the service of all,
and regard the world as a hostel where all men are
fellow-sojourners ; he must open his conscience to the
gods and live as if all his actions were public.-^

Among the many great sayings of my friend
Demetrius [Seneca writes elsewhere], here is one that
I have just heard and that still rings in my ears, * The
man who has never known adversity seems to be un-
happiest of all, for he has never been able to test himself.' ^

Demetrius concealed neither his thoughts
nor his dwelling-place, yet he contrived to live
without serious molestation under tyrant after
tyrant, and died at last in extreme old age in the
principate of Domitian. Caligula endeavoured to
propitiate him by an enormous present of money,
but the philosopher laughingly rejected it, ob-
serving afterwards that if the emperor wished
to corrupt him he should at least have offered
him his whole empire. Later he lived for a time
at Corinth, where he made the acquaintance of
the thaumaturgist Apollonius of Tyana. Coming
to Rome, he became the honoured companion
and spiritual adviser of Seneca, Thrasea, and
other distinguished men. He was present with
Helvidius at Thrasea's death, and it was to him
that that high-minded senator addressed his last
words. ^ When Nero's gymnasium was completed
he made his way into the new building and there

^ De Benef. vii. i. ' * De Providentia, 3.

^ Tac, Ann. xvi. 35J

SENECA IN RETIREMENT 125

denounced the custom of bathing, declaring that
the bathers only enfeebled and polluted themselves,
and that such institutions were a useless expense.
' He was only saved from immediate death, as
the penalty of such language, by the fact that Nero
was in extra good voice when he sang on that
day, which he did in the tavern adjoining the
gymnasium, naked, except for a girdle round his
waist.' ^ The philosopher was nevertheless charged
by TigelHnus with having ruined the bath, and
was banished from Rome. After the death of
Nero he returned to the city, but, wearing out
the patience of Vespasian by the frankness of
his criticisms, he was again banished with other
philosophers by that emperor.

A third friend of Seneca was Caesonius Maximus.
He is only once mentioned in Seneca's letters, but
we know from Martial how close was the friend-
ship between the two men. * This powerful friend
of the eloquent Seneca,' writes the poet, ' was
almost as dear to him as the beloved Serenus,
perhaps even dearer.'^

Maximus was a Roman of the governing class
who passed through the usual course of honours,
ending as consul suffectus and proconsul in
Sicily under Nero.^ After Seneca's death Maximus

^ Philostratus, Apol. iv. 42.
* Martial, vii. 45 :

! Facundi Senecae potens amicus,
Caro proximus, aut prior, Sereno.'

' The consuls who gave their name to the year were those
appointed on the first of January. These were the consules
ordinavii, but under the Empire they were accustomed to resign
their of&ces after a few months or even weeks, and consules
suffecti were appointed to fill their places.

126 SENECA

with others of his friends was banished from
Italy without trial. A certain Quintus Ovidius,
to whom Martial afterwards addressed two epi-
grams, and who, according to that poet, was
to Maximus all that Maximus was to Seneca,
braved the tyrant's resentment by accompanying
him into exile, and earned through this gallant
action such immortality as Martial's verses could
bestow. The letters of Seneca to Maximus were
published and were extant in Martial's time,
but have been lost.^

In a letter to Lucilius, Seneca describes a
two days' jaunt made by Maximus and himself.
Their purpose was to try with how many of the
things commonly thought indispensable by a rich
Roman on his travels it was possible, without
real inconvenience, to dispense.

There are many things [he wrote] which we think
necessary, but should not miss if some accident were to
deprive us of them. If, then, we of set purpose went
without them we should not feel their loss. That
lesson I have learnt from my expedition. Starting
with slaves so few that a single waggon could hold
them, and without any luggage that we did not carry
on our persons, I and my friend Maximus have been
enjoying a delightful two days' expedition. I slept
on a mattress spread on the bare ground. One rain-
mantle acted as sheet and one as coverlet. Nothing
unnecessary was served at our meals, which took little
time to prepare. Dried figs were invariable ; and our
tablets were always ready at hand to note impressions.
The figs, when there is bread, serve as a seasoning ; when
there is none, they serve as bread. ... I drove in a
rustic waggon. The mules just showed they were alive

1 Tac, Ann. xv. 7 ; Martial, vii. 44, 45.

SENECA IN RETIREMENT 127

by moving ; the muleteer went barefoot, not because
it was summer, but because he had no shoes. I own,
however, that I felt some uneasiness at being thought the
owner of this conveyance, and the fact that I did so
shows that I have not yet succeeded in freeing myself
from false shame. Whenever we met some splendid
equipage, do what I would I felt embarrassed — a proof
that I am not yet steadfastly fixed in the principles
I approve and commend, for the man who is ashamed
of a humble vehicle will glory in a costly one. I have
made little progress. As yet I hardly venture to practise
frugality in public ; I still have regard to the opinion
of wayfarers.^

But the most interesting of Seneca's friends
was the Epicurean, Lucilius Junior, to whom
the famous letters were addressed, as well as
the Naturales Quaestiones and the treatise De
Providentia. Lucilius was an administrator, a
philosopher, and a poet. He had known Seneca
when they were both young at Pompeii, where
he had a house, and where perhaps he was
born.

A man [Seneca wrote to him in Sicily] must be dull
and insensible indeed, my Lucilius, who forgets his friend
until reminded of him by some local association, yet
famiUar spots do sometimes wake again the sense of
bereavement deep hidden in our hearts, not by reviving
a perished memory, but by rousing it from slumber.
Thus the grief of mourners even when softened by time
is renewed by the sight of a familiar slave at the door,
or of clothing, or of a house. I cannot describe how
I missed you and how fresh seemed the pain of losing
you when I arrived in Campania, and especially at
Naples and when I saw your Pompeii. I see you with

1 Ep. 87.

128 SENECA

extraordinary distinctness, especially as you were when
I was quitting you. I see you swallowing your tears
and attempting in vain to show no signs of the strong
emotion you felt. I seem but yesterday to have lost
you. But to those who remember, what may not be called
' yesterday ' ? Only yesterday I sat as a boy under
Sotion the philosopher, yesterday I began to plead causes,
yesterday I ceased to wish to plead, yesterday I became
unable to plead. Infinite is the swiftness of time. We
see this most clearly when we look back, for it escapes
the notice of men intent on the present, so unbroken and
continuous is time's headlong flight. The reason is this.
All time past is in the same position ; you may regard it
as a whole, it is spread before you and uniform : all things
belonging to it are merged in the same abyss, nor, when
the whole is brief, can long intervals within it exist.
Our actual life is a point, less than a point ; but nature,
to make it seem longer, has divided it into parts. One
she has made infancy, another childhood, another youth,
another the interval between youth and old age, another
old age itself. How many degrees in so narrow a space !
But a little time ago I was in your company, yet this
little time is a considerable part of our life ; on the
brevity of which we should constantly meditate. I used
not to think the passage of Time so rapid. Now its
flight seems to me incredibly swift ; whether it is that
I see the goal approaching, or whether I have begun to
notice and reckon up all I lose.^

And in a later letter he relates how the sight of
Pompeii again recalled to him Lucilius and his
own youth.

Lucilius raised himself from small beginnings
by his own industry and talents. During the
reigns of Caligula and Claudius he is said to
have played a difficult part with honour to him-

1 Ep» 49.

SENECA IN RETIREMENT 129

self, to have refused to flatter the reigning
favourites, and to have risked his hfe through
fidehty to his friends. ^ Under Nero he became
Procurator of Sicily, and it was from that island
that he corresponded with Seneca. Seneca warns
him so earnestly against ambition and the danger
of listening to flatterers, that we may fairly con-
jecture that this warning indicates the presence
of corresponding infirmities in the man to whom
it was addressed. But he praises his temperance,
modesty, and disinterestedness.

Lucilius from his youth gave much of his
time to liberal studies, and especially to poetry
and philosophy. While he was in Sicily he wrote,
at the suggestion of Seneca, a poem on Aetna,
which is still extant.^ In this poem Lucihus

1 Sen., Nat. Quaest. iv. in Praef. Seneca does not explain the
circumstances to which he alludes.

* The authorship has been disputed, especially by Lipsius ;
but the identification seems almost established. It is probable
that Cornelius Severus, a poet of the Augustan age, whom
Seneca mentions together with Virgil and Ovid as having
treated the subject, and to whom the poem has in consequence
been attributed, like Virgil and Ovid only introduced a descrip-
tion of Aetna into one of his poems ; and in any case he
cannot have been the author of the existing work which contains
words first used in a later generation. On the other hand, the
coincidences with Seneca are so striking that those who hold
that the poem was written by Severus have been driven to the
hypothesis that Seneca borrowed from it some of his ideas in
the Naturales Quaestiones. Here we have, on the one hand,
a poem written on the subject of Aetna by a philosopher of
the Epicurean school, and from the style and language bearing
the marks of the Neronian age and of the school of Seneca ;
and on the other, a Lucilius Junior who is not only procurator
of Sicily, a poet, and an Epicurean philosopher of the age of
Nero, but one to whom Seneca suggests that he should write
a poem on this very subject. Such is a summary of part of
the evidence.

130 SENECA

treats his subject in a scientific and philosophical
spirit, discarding, not in silence Uke Lucan, but
with open contempt, all supernatural explanations
of the phenomena. The poets, he tells us, vainly
imagined the pallid kingdom of Pluto beneath
the ashes, the waters of Styx with Cerberus, the
giant Tityos spread over seven acres, Tantalus
with his eternal thirst foiled by the retreating
water, Ixion and the wheel, Minos and his judg-
ments. Not content with this they pry into
the manners of the gods, and picture them full
of worse than human lusts and passions. But
as for me, he continues, ' truth is my only care.'
Seneca says the same thing in prose :

Remember [he says to Marcia] that evil exists not
for the dead. All those tales of infernal regions are
fables invented to terrify us. For the dead there is
neither darkness nor prison, nor rivers of fire, nor Lethe,
nor tribunals, nor accused. In that free state there are
no fresh tyrants. These things are the fond imagina-
tions of poets who delude us into empty fears. Death
is alike the reward and the end of all pain ; beyond it
our sufferings cannot extend ; it replaces us in that
state of perfect tranquillity which was ours before we
were born. If we pity the dead, we should pity those
unborn.

And again, in the treatise De Vita Beat a he
speaks of the folly of poets who impute every vice
to Jupiter — making him a parricide, a usurper,
and a seducer. Their motive must be, he says,
to relieve men by such examples from any sense
of guilt in their own actions.^

1 Aetna, 72-89 ; Seneca, Cons, ad Marc. 19 : De Vita
Beata, 26.

SENECA IN RETIREMENT 131

For Seneca philosophy was divided into two
branches, the one concerned with human and
the other with divine matters. The former is
what we should now call moral philosophy or
ethics ; the latter natural science. For the purely
speculative part of philosophy, for all that had
no bearing either upon the conduct of human
life or upon the order of nature, he felt not only
indifference but an impatient contempt. Lucilius,
on the other hand, was much more attracted by
metaphysics. He enjoyed the logical puzzles,
paradoxes, and distinctions of the schools, and
was constantly endeavouring in his letters to
entice Seneca into abstract discussions. Again,
in the matter of style, to which Lucilius attached
a high importance, Seneca is constantly impress-
ing upon him the danger of paying too much
attention to words. ' Ovatio vultus animi est,'
he says. * Speech is the countenance of the soul ;
if it is over-polished and coloured and, so to
speak, manipulated, one infers that the soul also
is unsound and feeble.' Constantly he returns to
these topics, and dwells on the waste of time
involved in idle exercises of ingenuity.

How do they help me ? [he asks]. Do they make me
braver, more just, more temperate ? I have no leisure
for such exercises ; I still need a doctor. Why teach
me this useless science ? You promise great things ; you
give me small ones. You told me I should be fearless
when swords were glancing around me, when the dagger's
point was at my throat ; you said I should be with-
out concern in fire or shipwreck. Teach me to despise
pleasure and glory ; when I have learnt that, we may

132 SENECA

proceed to the solution of riddles, to nice distinctions,
to the elucidation of obscurities ; for the present let us
keep to the essential.^

To understand Seneca's reiterated inp^istence
in these letters on the vital necessity of a mental
discipline which should brace the mind against
all that might befall, and prepare a man to
face death at any moment at the hands of a
tyrant, we must remember that they were written
at a time when these trials were becoming
increasingly possible for every man of mark.
Philosophy, he is always saying, is concerned
with action, not with words ; and the test of
proficiency is the concordance of practice with
theory. It teaches us to distinguish realities
from appearances. Death, for instance, may
come through a tyrant or a fever, pain through
disease or an executioner ; such differences cannot
change their nature, they are still but death
and pain. Yet we fear them far more in the
one case than in the other, for it is the pomp
and circumstance of things and not the things
themselves that form the subjects of our fear.^
' Remember,' he tells him, ' that there is nothing
admirable in man except his soul, to which when
great all other things are small.' ^ Wisdom con-
sists in constancy of will — a constancy unalter-

1 Ep. 109. In tliis long controversy between the rhetoricians
and philosophers, between ' the artists of the pure form of speech
and the investigators of the inmost nature of things,' Seneca, in
direct opposition to his father's view, was the protagonist of the
philosophers. See Friedlander, iii. 3.

* 'Ef&cientia non effectum spectat timor.'

^ ' Cogita in te, praeter animum, niliil esse mirabile : cui
magno nihil magnum est ' {Ep. 8).

SENECA IN RETIREMENT 133

able by external circumstances. It is thus that
the service of philosophy becomes the only true
freedom. This constancy can only be acquired
by continual attention to realities — the spinning
of syllogisms and the ravelling and unravelling
of academical knots are nothing to the purpose.
It is the first sign of a weak and untrained mind
to dread the unexperienced. To banish this dread
should be the chief end of our endeavours. We
shall find our medicine pleasant to the taste, for
it is one that pleases while it heals.

A happy life [he says] is founded in a freedom from
concern and an abiding tranquillity. These are the gifts
of greatness of soul, and of a steady persistence in what
has been well resolved. We may reach this goal if
we behold truth as a whole, if in all we do we preserve
order, moderation, fitness, and a will guiltless and kindly,
looking to Reason for guidance and never departing
from her precepts, which are alike lovable and wondrous.
. . , Let the man who finds his chief good in tastes
and colours and sounds renounce the fellowship of the
most glorious of living beings second only to the gods ;
and join dumb animals rejoicing in their pasture. . . .
No man is free who is the slave of his body. For
not only does his anxiety on its behalf throw him into
the power of all those who can injure it, but it is itself
a surly and exacting commander. The free spirit
sometimes quits it with calm indifference, sometimes
springs from it with a generous ardour, and in either
case cares as little for its future destiny as we do for
that of the bristles of our beards after shaving.^

Though the main object of Seneca's counsels
was to prepare his friend to meet with forti-

1 Ep. 92.

134 SENECA

tude whatever fate might have in store for
him, he does not neglect the humbler warnings
of prudence. He advises him to live as retired
a life as possible, to avoid singularity, to occupy
himself as little as possible with politics while
avoiding a conspicuous withdrawal from them,
for this too excites suspicion, and to be cautious
with whom he conversed.

For your greater security [he writes] I would have you
observe certain precautions, which you must take from
me as though I were prescribing rules for the preserva-
tion of your health when living in your Ardeatine villa.
Reflect what are the motives which incite a man to
the destruction of another : you will find them to be
hope, envy, hatred, fear, or contempt.

He proceeds to give admirable advice as to
how to avoid exciting these emotions in the
minds of others ; but ends by saying that, after
all, every man's best security is his innocence,
and that the guilty, though they sometimes
chance to escape, can never feel sure of doing so.
The man is punished who expects punishment ;
and whoever deserves it expects it. Thus the
imprudent always suffer the penalty of their follies
and crimes. But if all these precautions are
taken, can I guarantee your safety ? I can no
more promise you that, replies Seneca, than I can
promise perpetual health to a man who takes due
care of himself .^ Roman senators during the last
half of Nero's principate lived under a sword of
Damocles comparable to that which threatened
French aristocrats during the Reign of Terror.

> Ep. 14.

SENECA IN RETIREMENT 135

' Palpitantibus praecordiis vivitur.' The mission of
Seneca was to give courage to the despairing, to
teach them to meet death with fortitude, and to
convince them that no man need be a slave, since
the liberty to die could not be taken from him.
Thus the great refuge from tyranny was self-
destruction, the right to which he asserts time
and again with terrible earnestness. ' There are
professors of wisdom,' he writes, 'to whom it is
anathema to offer violence to our own persons or
cut short our own lives. We must wait till Nature
releases us. Those who say this do not see that
they are barring the way to liberty. The eternal
law contains nothing better than this, that it has
given us only one entrance into life but many
exits.' 'No one is justified in complaining of life,
for no one is obliged to live. Are you content ?
Then live. Not contf^^-n^ ? You may return whence
you came. ' ^ And later in the same letter, ' The way
to that great liberty is opened with a bodkin : our
safety is contained in a prick.' ^ And again in the
De Ira : ' Wherever you cast your eyes you
will find the end of your ills. Do you see that
precipice ? It is the descent to liberty. That sea ?
that river ? that well ? Beneath their waters liberty
lies concealed. Do you see that little misshapen
tree ? There hangs liberty.' ^

* Ep. 68 : ' Hoc est unum, cur de vita non possumus queri ;
neminem tenet. . . . Placet ? vive. Non placet ? licet eo reverti
unde venisti.'

' ' Scalpello aperitur ad illam magnam libertatem via : et
puncto securitas constat.' Cp. Hamlet, 'When he himself may
his quietus make with a bare bodkin.'

3 De Ira, ii. 15.

CHAPTER XI

LETTER TO LUCILIUS ON AETNA — SENECA'S
RICHES AND APOLOGIA

Seneca was greatly interested in an expedition
round Sicily made by Lucilius, and the letter in
which he speaks of it may be given in full, not
only as an illustration of his inquiring and specu-
lative mind, but because in it he makes the first
suggestion of the poem on Aetna :

I am waiting for your letters to hear what new dis-
coveries you have made in sailing round Sicily, and
especially what fuller information you can give me
about Charybdis. For I know very well that Scylla
is a rock and not very formidable to navigators, but I
am anxious to hear from you whether Charybdis answers
to her reputation in story. If you happen to have
observed it (and it is worthy of observation), tell me
whether the whirlpools appear when the wind is in one
quarter only, or if that sea is afflicted with them in
every kind of weather ; and also if it is true that any-
thing drawn into that vortex is carried many miles
under water and only reappears near the coast of Tauro-
menium. After you have written fully to me of aU this,
I shall venture to commission you further, for my sake,
to ascend Aetna, which is said to have been formerly
seen by navigators from a greater distance than now,
whence the inference is drawn that it is consuming

LETTER TO LUCILIUS ON AETNA 137

away and gradually subsiding. But the cause may rather
be that the fire has died away and bursts forth with
less force and magnitude than formerly, the smoke also
becoming more sluggish for the same reason. Neither
of these theories is incredible ; the one that the
mountain by daily consumption is becoming less, the
other that the fire does not remain the same — the fire
that does not spring from the mountain itself but boils
up from some underground pit where it is generated
and fed from below, the mountain itself yielding it not
ahment but a passage. There is a well-known district
in Lycia, called Hephaestion by the inhabitants, where
the soil is perforated in several places, and a perfectly
harmless fire runs round it which does no injury to
the plants. So the country is fertile and grassy, nothing
is scorched by the flames, which gHmmer but faintly
and have no force. But let us reserve these things
for another time, and then when you write to me on
the subject I shall also ask how far the snows, which
even summer cannot melt, much less the volcanic fires,
are distant from the crater's mouth. And you have no
right to impute this trouble to me, for if no one had
commissioned you to do so you suffer from a certain
malady which would not have allowed you to rest till
you had described Aetna in a poem and approached this
ground sacred for ail poets. That Virgil had already
done full justice to this subject did not prevent Ovid
from handling it ; nor did both of them together deter
Severus Cornelius. So happy a material does this place
afford to all, that those who have gone before appear
to me not to have anticipated all that can be said, but
to have opened the way. It makes a great difference
whether your subject has been exhausted or only treated ;
in the latter case it grows as time goes on, and the in-
vention of former writers is no obstacle to that of their
successors. Moreover, the latter are placed in the best
position. They find words ready for use, and by arrang-
ing these differently can give them a new appearance ;
nor do they steal them as if they belonged to others.

138 SENECA

for they are public property. Lawyers deny that any
public property can be appropriated by prescription. I
am mistaken in you if Aetna does not whet your appetite.
Already you are wishing to write something great and
equal to the work of your predecessors — equal, I say,
for j^our modesty does not allow you to hope for more ;
a modesty so great that I think you would rather with-
hold something from the full force of your genius than
run the risk of surpassing them, so high is your reverence
for the elder poets. Wisdom has this good point among
the rest, that no one can be surpassed therein by another
except during the ascent. When you reach the summit
all are equal, there is no room for an increase, a halt is
made. Can the sun add aught to his greatness ? Can
the moon wax further than she is wont ? The seas do
not increase ; the universe preserves the same habit and
measure. Whatever has completed its natural magni-
tude cannot gain in stature. Wise men, in so far as
wise, are equal and on a level. Each of them may
have his own proper gifts : one will be more easy
of access, another readier, another more fluent, another
more eloquent ; that wisdom of which we are speaking,
that only source of happiness, will be equal in all. Whether
your Aetna can sink down and fall in upon itself, or
whether the constant action of the fire can draw down
this lofty summit, so conspicuous over a wide expanse
of sea, I know not ; neither flame nor crumbling away
can lower the height of virtue. This is the one majesty
that can never be degraded ; it can be neither extended
nor reduced. Its magnitude is fixed, like that of the
heavenly bodies. To her let us endeavour to raise
ourselves : much is already done, or rather, to confess
the truth, not much. For it is not goodness to be better
than the worst. Who boasts of eyes that shrink from
dayhght ? for which the sun shines through a mist ?
Though he may be satisfied to have escaped from total
darkness, he does not yet enjoy the full light of day.
Then will our soul have cause for rejoicing when escaping
from the darkness in which it was involved, it sees no

LETTER TO LUCILIUS ON AETNA 139

longer dimly and uncertainl}^ but admits the perfect
light ; when it is restored to its heavenly home and has
recovered the place to which it was born. Our soul's
origin calls it heavenward. It will gain heaven even
beiore it is loosed from these bonds if it fling away its
faults and emerge unstained and untrammelled into the
contemplation of the divine mysteries. This is what
we should do, my dearest Lucilius ; toward this end
should we strain with our whole strength, though few
know what we do, and none see us. Glory is the shadow
of virtup • it will accompany even those who shun it. But
just as a shadow sometimes goes before and sometimes
follows after, so glory is sometimes before us and offers
itself to the view, but at other times holds back until
envy has passed away, when it appears the greater for
having come late. How long Democritus seemed a
madman ! Fame scarce welcomed Socrates. How long
was Cato ignored by the State ! It rejected him, and only
understood when it had lost him. Had Rutilius never
suffered wrong his innocence and virtue would have re-
mained hidden ; he became famous through the violence
done to him. Did he not thank his fortune and embrace
his exile ? I speak of those whom Fortune by persecu-
tion has rendered illustrious in their lifetime ; how many
are those whose accomplishments have become known
only after their death ! how many whom Fame has not
received but dragged out ! You see how greatly not
merely the learned, but this whole throng of the
unlearned, admire Epicurus. He was quite unknown
at Athens itself, where he lived in obscurity. Many
years after the death of his friend Metrodorus, speaking
in one of his letters with grateful recollection of their
friendship, he ends with this — that among so many ad-
vantages it was of no disservice to Metrodorus and him-
self that they lived in that famous country of Greece, not
only unknown, but almost unheard. Did he on this ac-
count remain undiscovered after he had ceased to exist ?
Did not his opinions then shine forth ? Metrodorus also
confesses in one of his letters that Epicurus and himself

i-

140 SENECA

were less audible than they should have been, but
foretold that they would have a great and estabhshed
name among those who were willing to follow in their
footsteps. No virtue remains concealed ; to have l^in
concealed is no loss. The day will come which will
reveal what is hidden and suppressed by the maUgnity
of the age. The man who thinks only of his own genera-
tion is born for few. Many thousands of years, many
thousands of peoples, will come after : look to them.
Even if all your contemporaries are silent through envy,
there will come those who will judge you without favour
or prejudice. If Fame can offer any reward to virtue,
neither will this be lost. The verdict of posterity, indeed,
will be nothing to us ; yet posterity will honour us and
resort to us though we perceive it not. Virtue will
requite us whether alive or dead, if only we follow her
in good faith, if we adorn not ourselves with the false
and meretricious, but remain the same whether we have
to act in a conspicuous position and after due warning ;
or suddenly and unprepared. Simulation profits nothing.
A false exterior adopted for appearance' sake imposes
superficially upon a few ; truth is always the same in
all her parts. There is no soHdity in the things that
deceive. A lie is thin; if you look closely you can see
through it.^

Seneca was immensely rich. His gardens
(' Senecae praedivitis hortos ' ^), his villas, his furni-
ture were renowned ; and although he was com-
pletely free from the grosser forms of self-indulgence
and was personally simple to the point of austerity
in his manner of life, these riches and the elegance
of his surroundings laid him open to a charge of
inconsistency between his theory and his practice,
which was pressed home by his enemies during
his lifetime, and has never ceased to be repeated

* Ep. 79, ^ Juv. ix.

LETTER TO LUCILIUS ON AETNA 141

by later critics, '^^ut to suppose that Seneca
thought riches an evil in themselves — as the first
Christians, who were his contemporaries and
whose teaching resembles his on many other
points, really did think — is to misunderstand his
whole doctrine. Things in themselves, according
to the Stoics, are neither good nor evil, but only
the use we make of them and the manner in
which we regard and handle them. They are
the material, not the substance, of good and evil.
A wise man may possess riches so long as he
regards himself merely as Fortune's banker, and
is ready to yield them up at her demand with
as little regret as a banker pays out the deposits
of his clients. The danger is lest the rich man
should confound his shirt with his skin and regard
his possessions as part of himself. If he does not
do this he may without inconsistency prefer riches
to poverty, just as he may deny that exile is
an evil, and yet if it be in his power spend his life
in his native land, or as he may think a short
Hfe as desirable as a long, and yet may live to a
tranquil old age. The reason, indeed, for thinking
lightly of such things is not that we may rid
ourselves of them, but that we may enjoy them
without anxiety. The difference between you and)
me, wrote Seneca to his critics, is that my richest*
belong to me ; you to your riches.

In the treatise De Vita Beata, addressed to his
brother Gallio, Seneca stated with uncompromising
frankness and force— impossible, one would think,
to a disingenuous man — the charges brought
against him on this head, and gave his answer.

142 SENECA

The following extracts will enable the reader to
form his own judgment on accusation and defence.
The genuine humility of the man — rare indeed
among Romans — his objective outlook and his
mental detachment, are nowhere more conspicuous.

If, then, one of these barking critics of philosophy
says to me : ' Why are your words so much stronger
than your deeds ? How is it that you talk submissively
to superiors ; and consider money a necessary means to
your ends, and are affected by its loss ? Why do you
weep when you hear of the loss of a wife or a friend ?
Why are you careful of your reputation and vexed
by slander ? Why that elaborate adornment of your
country-seats so far beyond the needs of nature ? Why
are your banquets not restricted to the limits of your
rule ? Why this beautiful furniture, this wine older
than yourself, these trees that yield nothing but shade ?
Why does your wife wear in her ears the fortune of a
rich family ? Why are your attendants clothed in precious
raiment ? Why does the service at your house amount
to a fine art, the plate arranged with the utmost skill
and attention, the chief carver himself an artist ? ' You
may add if you please : ' Why do you possess estates
across the sea ? Why have you slaves whose names
you know not ? — are you so forgetful that you cannot
remember the few there are, or are you so unthrifty
as to have more than you can remember ? * I will help
you to abase me anon and suggest for your use fresh
objections which have escaped your attention : now
hear my reply. ' I am not a wise man, and, so please
your malice, I never shall be. I therefore do not claim
to be equal with the best, but only better than the
worst. Enough for me if every day I make some little
progress, and can clearly see and denounce my own
errors. I am not cured ; I never shall be cured. I con-
trive palliations rather than remedies for my malady ;
and am content if its attacks become gradually rarer.

LETTER TO LUCILIUS ON AETNA 143

Compared to your pace, however, I am a tolerable runner.
In what I am going to say I speak not for myself ; for
I am sunk in every kind of fault, but for one who has made
progress. This charge of inconsistency was brought
by the mahgnant enemies of all virtue against Plato,
against Epicurus, against Zeno, It is of virtue, not of
myself, that I speak ; I make war upon vices, my own
before all others. When I can, may I live as I ought.
Your poisonous malice, the gall with which in sprinkling
others you destroy yourselves, shall never affright me
from communion with the best, or prevent me from
celebrating — not the life which I lead, but the life
which I know should be led — or from adoring virtue and
following her footsteps at however vast a distance, even
on my hands and knees. . . . Philosophers, it is said,
do not practise what they preach. But they practise
much of what they preach and finely conceive. If, indeed,
their lives were on a level with their doctrines, what could
equal their felicity ? In the meantime good words and
a breast stocked with good thoughts are not to be despised.
So excellent a form of study, though it fail of its full
effect, in itself deserves to be had in honour. What
wonder that few should reach so difficult a summit ?
Yet we ought to respect the climbers, even if they slip ;
for great is their attempt. The man is generous who,
regarding not his own individual strength but that of
the nature proper to man, conceives in his mind and
endeavours to carry out an ideal so high that in practice
it lies beyond the reach even of the loftiest of the human
race. Such a man has thus resolved within himself :
* I will meet death as calmly as I hear of it : my soul
supporting my body, there is no labour that I will not
undergo. Riches, whether present or absent, I will
equally despise ; neither the sadder if I have them not,
nor elated if they shine in my possession. I shall consider
aU land as if it were mine ; my own land as if it belonged
to all. I shall live as knowing that I am born for others ;
and for this I shall give thanks to Nature. For how
could she better have consulted my interests ? She

144 SENECA

gave me to all men ; but she has given all men to me.

That which I have I shall neither meanly hoard nor

foolishly squander. None of my possessions will seem to

me more truly my own than what I have well bestowed ;

benefits I shall reckon neither by number nor by weight,

but by the worth of the recipient. I shall never count

the cost of what I give to merit. Opinion shall never,

and conscience always, guide my actions. ... I will be

pleasant to my friends, mild and placable to my enemies,

I will forgive before my forgiveness is asked, I will

satisfy all honest petitions. I shall know that the world

is my country with the gods as its rulers, and these I

shall regard as the judges of all I do and all I say. And

so whenever Nature takes once more my spirit to herself,

or when my reason releases it, I shall go hence bearing

witness that I have loved a good conscience and a good

manner of life, and that none through me have suffered

loss of liberty, myself least of all.' ^

Such was the apologia of Seneca, and we can-
not doubt that it was sincere. His personal habits
were simple to the verge of austerity ; the choice
wine that he gave to his guests he did not him-
self touch ; he was distinguished as a generous
friend to honest poverty, especially among men of
letters ; nothing is recorded by historians of his
five years of power to lead us to question the truth
of his boast, that by his means no man had been
unjustly deprived of liberty.

But there was another consideration relating
to the source of his wealth which he could not
directly advance, but which he suggested in
several other passages in his books. Without
mortal offence to the emperor he could not have
refused his gifts. In his treatise ' On Benefits '

» De Vita Beata, 17, 20.

LETTER TO LUCILIUS ON AETNA 145

he lays down the rule that we should not re-
ceive favours except from those on whom, were
the circumstances altered, we would confer them.
It is a burden to incur obligation to those whom
we can neither love nor respect. Thereupon the
question is raised whether if a brutal and passionate
tyrant, who will hold himself insulted by a refusal,
offers us a present we are bound to refuse it.
The king has the soul, let us say, of a robber or
pirate and is unworthy that we should accept
his bounty. The answer made is that when we
are free to choose we must take nothing from
the unworthy ; but that in the case supposed we
are not accepting but obeying,^ and again :

To refuse a gift is to incense against ourselves an
insolent monarch, who would have all that comes from
his hands valued at a high rate. It matters not whether
you are unwilUng to give to a king or to receive from
him, the offence is equal in either case, or rather even
graver in the latter, since to the proud it is more bitter
to be disdained than not to be feared.^

In another passage of the same work he dis-
cusses the question whether gratitude is due to
tyrants, and whether their favours should be re-
turned, and answers affirmatively with respect to
all cases where this is consistent with the public
weal. If, he says, he had had the misfortune to
be obliged by one who subsequently became the
most infamous of tyrants, who found a pleasure
in shedding human blood and breaking all the
rights and laws of human society, then he would
feel aU bonds dissolved between them, because

1 De BeneJ. ii. i8. * Ibid., v. 6.

146 SENECA

the duty he owed to humanity must always
take precedence of an obUgation to a single
individual.

But [he adds] although this is so, and although
from the time when by violating every human right
and so making it impossible for himself to be wronged
by any man, he has made me free to do what I will
againFi; him, yet I shall still reckon myself bound to
discharge my debt so far as may stand with my pubhc
duty. I must not add to his power for evil ; I must not
increase his destructive forces or confirm those he has.
But if without injury to the commonwealth I may
return his kindness, I will do so. I would save his
infant son from death, for that could not injure the
victims of his cruelty ; but I would not contribute a
penny to the support of his mercenaries. If he hanker
after marbles and fine raiment, that can do no mischief
to any man, and I will help him to them ; soldiers and
arms I will not supply. If he entreat me as a great
kindness to send him comedians and women, and other
such delights which may temper his brutaUty, I will
find them for him willingly. Though I will not supply
him with triremes and ships of war, he shall have
luxuriously fitted boats of pleasure for his amusement.
But if I despair altogether of his amendment, the same
hand shall at one blow discharge my debt to him and
confer a benefit on all mankind, for to such a nature
death is a remedy, and to speed his departure the one
kindness I can do him.^

These words were written after Seneca's retire-
ment and shortly before the outbreak of the con-
spiracy of Piso, with the aims of which, whether
he knew of it or not, he must unquestionably have
sympathised. By that time Nero had sunk into

^ De BeneJ. vii. 20.

LETTER TO LUCILIUS ON AETNA 147

an abyss of infamy from which it was evident
that death alone could rescue him.

That Seneca made a good and generous use \
of his riches, we have not only his own testimony I
but that of Juvenal and Martial. And first as
to his own. In the De Vita Beata, after explain- \ {
ing that a philosopher may legitimately be rich, , ;
provided that his riches are honourably acquired, \ \
taken from no man, earned at the expense of j j
no man's sufferings, stained with no blood, and
spent as honourably as they were gained, he adds '
that they should not be rejected, unless either |
they are thought by their possessor to be useless,
or unless he confesses that he does not know '
how to use them. This brings him to a descrip-
tion of their proper employment, and he proceeds
thus :

He will give either to the good, or to those whom he
can make good. He will take the greatest trouble to
discover the worthiest and give to them, as one who
remembers that he must account not only for what he has
received but for what he has spent. He will give for good
and adequate reasons, since an ill-bestowed gift must be
counted as a bad form of wastefulness. His purse will be
open indeed, but have no holes in it ; much wiU come
from it, but nothing fall. It is a mistake to suppose that
bounty is an easy art. If it is thoughtfully given, if
there is no promiscuous squandering, it is on the contrary
most difficult. I oblige one man, I discharge my obliga-
tions to another, I come to the aid of a third, I take
pity on a fourth. I find one whose poverty binds him
to occupations unworthy of his abilities — I release
him from that poverty. To some, even though they
are in need, I wiU not give, because, whatever I give,
they mil always be in need ; to others I will offer aid

148 SENECA

though they have not asked it ; on others, again, I
will press it though they refuse. 1 cannot be careless
in this matter ; I never invest with more care than in
stock of tliis nature. Do you expect interest, then ?
I am asked. Well, at least, I do not wish to throw my
investment away. I wish so to place my donation that
though I must never seek a return, yet I may believe
a return to be possible. It should resemble a buried
treasure which you do not disinter unless it be necessary.
What an opportunity for kindness may not a rich man
find in his own household — for why should our liberality
be confined to the free ? Nature bids us do good unto
all men, whether free legally, or virtually by our consent :
wherever there is a man, there is room for kindness.-^

— - Such were Seneca's views, instinct with his
customary good sense and moderation, on the
subject of almsgiving and the use of money.
They have a modern ring, and would have qualified
him in the island of Britain eighteen hundred years
later for high office in the Charity Organisation
Society. We have some evidence that, in this
instance at least, his practice was on a level with
his precepts.

No one [wrote Juvenal, some twenty years after-
wards] now expects to receive what Seneca used to
send to very humble friends, or what the good Piso
or Gotta used to give ; for in those days a bountiful
disposition was thought to add lustre to honours and
titles.^

And Martial, whose Spanish origin may have
recommended him to Seneca, in the same vein re-
grets in two of his epigrams the spacious days of
Piso and Seneca and Memmius, whom he prefers

1 De Vita Beata, 24. ' Juv. v. 108.

LETTER TO LUCILIUS ON AETNA 149

to the most liberal patrons of his own time.^
Three other of Martial's epigrams are addressed
to Lucan's widow Polla, so that it is clear that his
friendship with Seneca's family did not end with
the philosopher's death.^

* Martial, iv. 40; xii. 36. * Ibid., vii. 21, 22, 23.

CHAPTER XII

THE CONSPIRACY OF PISO AND THE DEATH
OF SENECA, A.D. 64-65

The last public office held by Seneca was that
of consul suffedus, which he shared with Trebellius
Maximus. During their consulship a senatus
consultum was passed to protect executors or
trustees, who by a legal fiction were technically
the sole heirs of the estates which they
administered, from liabilities attaching to such
estates, on the principle that no man ought to
suffer on account of a trust which he has faithfully
discharged.^ Trebellius was afterwards governor
of Britain, where his inactivity and want of
military experience made him unpopular with
the army. The date of this consulship is generally
assigned to the year 62, on the insufficient ground
that Tacitus makes mention of a decree passed

1 Ins. Tit. 23 (4) : ' Neronis quidem temporibus, Trebellio
Maximo et Annaeo Seneca coss. senatus-consultum factum est,
quo cautum est, ut, si haereditas ex fidei-commissi causa restituta
sit, actiones, quae jure civili haeredi et in haeredem competerent,
ei et in eum darentur, cui ex fidei-commisso restituta esset haere-
ditas. Post quod senatus-consultum, praetor utiles actiones ei
et in eum qui recepit haereditatem, quasi haeredi et in haeredem,
dare coepit.'

THE CONSPIRACY OF PISO 151

by the Senate in that year for the restraint of
fictitious adoptions.^

The year 64, though a year of peace, was one
of calamity for Rome. From the time when
TigeUinus had succeeded to the power and
influence of Seneca and Burrhus, the progress
of Nero in the path of infamy had become ever
more rapid. Early in this year he sang on the
stage of the theatre at Naples, choosing that
city for his first public appearance because its
population was Greek. Thence he designed to
go to Greece, the home of the arts, and com-
pete for prizes at the historical festivals; but
abandoned that project for the time. He then
returned to Rome and made preparations for a
visit to Egypt ; but, to the great joy of the popu-
lace, who thought that his presence in Rome
secured their supply of amusements and provisions,
he changed his mind as to this also and remained
in the city. Charmed with this evidence of the
popularity he always coveted, and inferring that
it was more easily and more agreeably gained
by the methods of TigeUinus than by those
recommended by Seneca, he thereupon plunged
into the wildest excesses of luxury, extrava-
gance, and open debauchery. He entertained the
citizens at gorgeous banquets in public places,

1 It seems unlikely that Seneca should have been named
consul by the emperor in the year of the death of Burrhus and
his own partial disgrace. On the other hand, we know that
Nero refused to accept his resignation, and may at that time have
designated him consul as a mark of continued confidence. More-
over Trebellius, who was governor of Britain at the time of Nero's
death, would probably have received this appointment not very
long after holding the consulship.

152 SENECA

seemed to regard, in Tacitus' phrase, the whole
city as his house, and prostituted the noblest
Romans to the pleasures of the mob.

There followed the great fire, in the course
of which the greater part of Rome was burnt
to the ground. Nero, who was reported to have
watched the flames from the tower of Maecenas
with aesthetic delight, while he chanted in costume
a poem of his own composition on the destruction
of Troy, was accused of having himself contrived
the fire. Incendiaries were seen in the confu-
sion rushing about with torches in their hands,
stopping attempts to extinguish the fire, and
crying out that they had authority for what
they were doing. These were probably robbers,
but they were widely believed to be emissaries
of the emperor. Nero, alarmed at the loss of
his darling popularity, was roused to unwonted
efforts. He threw open his gardens and the
Campus Martins to the homeless multitude, and
ran up hastily built shelters for their reception ;
he imported necessaries from Ostia and the
neighbouring towns ; he supplied the people
with food at the lowest prices. Finally, he
sought to divert suspicion from himself by ac-
cusing the new and unpopular sect of Christians
of the crime, and after having by torture ex-
tracted confessions from some among them, large
numbers were arrested on their information and
put to horrible deaths. He illuminated his
gardens at night with the burning bodies of
these victims, and in the habit of a charioteer
mingled with the throng at the circus games,

THE CONSPIRACY OF PISO 153

where the Christian martyrs, clad in the skins of
wild beasts, were torn to pieces by his hounds.

Whether or not Nero was concerned in the
burning of Rome, the catastrophe allowed him
to satisfy his passion for the grandiose in the
rebuilding of Rome, and especially of his own
palace, on a magnificent scale. The old city with
its tall houses and narrow winding streets was
gone, and broad regular thoroughfares with houses
of moderate height, built of stone and fronted
by colonnades, were laid out in its place. At
the same time a fire-brigade and an improved
water-supply were organised. For the erection
of his own ' Golden House,' with its gardens and
lakes, its woods and solitudes, its open spaces
and prospects, a large area was reserved, and
even the Romans of that day, accustomed as
they were to every form of idle display, were
amazed at its superb extravagance.

This reckless prodigality, coinciding as it
did with the great destruction of wealth due
to the fire, was followed by the inevitable conse-
quences. The treasury was exhausted, and could
only be refilled by injustice and oppression.
Italy, says Tacitus, was devastated, the provinces
ruined. The gods themselves did not escape, for
the temples were despoiled of their treasures and
their images, and ancient historical memorials
ruthlessly destroyed in both Italy and Greece.
Seneca, who, though he had lost all influence,
had never been allowed entirely to break his
connection with the government, protested against
these proceedings, and, when his protests were

154 SENECA

disregarded, made a last effort to obtain per-
mission to withdraw into some distant retreat.
When this was refused, he made his health a
pretext for not quitting his bed-chamber, and
is said to have guarded himself against Nero's
attempts to poison him by reducing his diet to
water and the simplest food, the source of which
he could control. This is the last notice we have
of his intervention in public affairs.

The following year (65), the last of Seneca's
Hfe, was marked by the great conspiracy of Piso
and the ruthless proscription of senators and
others that followed its discovery. Piso, the head
of the ancient and illustrious Calpurnian family,
had been favoured alike by nature and by fortune,
and was perhaps the most popular man in Rome.
With a handsome countenance and a graceful
person he showed courtesy to all, and indulged
the love of magnificence which he combined with
literary tastes in a profusion which concihated
the affections and gained the admiration of a
pleasure-loving age. He was a generous patron
of men of letters, and was bracketed with his
friend Seneca in regretful reminiscence by the
Flavian poets. He was, moreover, famed for his
eloquence, which he had employed in pleading
the cause of citizens in the Forum. With all
these advantages Piso was too indolent and easy-
going to make a good chief of an enterprise that
required energy, active ambition, and resolution
to bring it to a successful issue.

The object of the conspiracy was the death
of Nero and the transfer of the Empire to Piso.

THE CONSPIRACY OF PISO 155

The conspirators were many in number, and for
the most part of senatorial or equestrian rank.
They included the consul designate Plautius
Lateranus ; Lucan, the poet who, forbidden by
Nero to publish or recite his poetry, had already
avenged himself in secret by the invective against
the tyranny of the Caesars contained in the later
books of the Pharsalia ; Subrius Flavins, a tribune
of the praetorian guard ; Senecio, who had been
an intimate friend of Nero's ; and Fenius Rufus,
the colleague of Tigellinus in his praetorian com-
mand. Various schemes, dictated by their re-
spective temperaments, were suggested by one
or other of the plotters. Some were for boldly
attacking the emperor while he was singing on
the public stage, trusting for success to the disgust
so widely felt for these performances ; but the
desire for impunit}^ ' ever adverse to great enter-
prises,' led others to prefer a scheme for setting
fire to the palace, when Nero might be slain in
the midst of the ensuing confusion. While the
conspirators were discussing these proposals and
disputing with one another, the indiscretion of a
woman named Epicharis nearly led to the dis-
covery of the plot. Volusius Proculus, who had
been among those employed by Nero in the murder
of his mother, was a naval officer of the fleet at
Misenum in high command. Dissatisfied with
the manner in which his guilty services had been
rewarded, he complained of his wrongs to Epicharis,
and spoke of revenge. This woman, who was in
the secret of the plot, was induced by his words
to hope that she might obtain for her friends

156 SENECA

this important recruit, and so, without betraying
the names of the conspirators, sufficiently indicated
what was afoot to lead him to report to the emperor
what he had heard. Epicharis was summoned
to Rome and confronted with the informer who,
however, found it impossible to confute her resolute
denials. Nero's suspicions had nevertheless been
aroused, and Epicharis was detained in custody.

This alarm determined the conspirators to
hasten their attempt. Nero was about to be Piso's
guest in his villa at Baiae, and the opportunity
seemed to many of them an excellent one for
carrying out their designs. But Piso refused to
violate, after the manner of Macbeth, the laws
of hospitality. ' Better,' he said, ' that the deed
should be done in the city, in that detested house
founded on the spoils of citizens. What was
done for the sake of the republic should be done
openly.' At last they resolved to execute their
plot at the Circus' games, where Nero was more
accessible than at other times. Lateranus, on
pretence of a petition, was to fall at the knees of
the emperor and, seizing them, to overturn him,
when the other conspirators would attack him
with their daggers. Piso, who was to await events
at the Temple of Ceres, was then to be summoned
to the camp by Fenius the prefect and by others,
and proclaimed emperor. The first blow was to
be struck by Flavins Scevinus, a conspirator
of senatorial rank, who had consecrated to this
end a dagger in the Temple of Safety, and now
withdrew it for its work.

To the imprudence of Scevinus the discovery

THE CONSPIRACY OF PISO 157

of the conspiracy was due. On the day before
that fixed upon for the execution of the plot,
after a long conference with his fellow-conspirator
Natalis, he returned home, signed his will, and
complaining of the rustiness of the dagger which
he had withdrawn from the temple, ordered his
freedman Milichus to sharpen it. There followed
a dinner of unwonted splendour and numerously
attended, when it was evident to all that the
host had something on his mind, and the gaiety
which he affected appeared forced and unnatural.
Afterwards he emancipated his favourite slaves,
and gave presents of money to others ; and,
lastly, he bade Milichus prepare bandages for
wounds, and all that was necessary for stopping
the flow of blood. All these circumstances roused
the suspicions of Milichus. The hope of reward
with the fear lest his treachery might be antici-
pated by the inferences of some other observer
from the same tokens, in which case his fidelity
would be of no service to his master and dangerous
to himself, overcame his sense of obligation to
the patron to whom he owed his freedom, and
led him early the next morning to report his
suspicions to the emperor. Scevinus was seized
and brought to the palace. There he answered
the charges with boldness, denying some of the
acts imputed to him, and explaining others with
such plausibility that the charge would have
broken down had not Milichus recalled the con-
ference with Natahs and suggested that the
latter should be arrested and examined as to
its subject. This was done, and Natalis and

158 SENECA

Scevinus, being separately examined and giving
inconsistent accounts of their conversation, were
flung into irons and, succumbing to the threat
of torture, made both of them a full confession,
each doubtless under the impression that the
other had first confessed. Natalis was the first
to name Piso, and then with the view, according
to Tacitus, of giving pleasure to Nero, he related
that he had visited Seneca on Piso's behalf to
complain of the cessation of their intercourse.
Seneca, he said, had excused himself on the
ground that frequent conversations and meet-
ings would conduce to the interests of neither,
but had added that his own welfare depended on
Piso's safety. Lucan and others were incrimi-
nated by Scevinus. Lucan, after long denials,
was led to confess by a promise of pardon, but
admirers of his poetry may hope that the report
that, in order to conciliate the sympathy of a
matricide emperor, he had the unspeakable base-
ness to accuse his mother, Atilia, of complicity was
an invention of his enemies.

Nero now bethought himself of Epicharis,
who had been detained in custody on the informa-
tion of Proculus. Tigellinus caused this woman
to be questioned under torture ; but the most
exquisite inventions of his exasperated cruelty
could not wring from her a single name, and
while on the second day, unable to walk, she
was being supported to the torture-chamber,
she contrived by strangling herself to thwart the
further efforts of her persecutors. Her constancy
was in striking contrast to the weakness of her
distinguished confederates, whose courage had

THE CONSPIRACY OF PISO 159

been broken by the very sight of instruments
of torture.

The friends of Piso urged him at this juncture
to repair to the camp and appeal to soldiers and
populace. As things were, they said, nothing
worse could happen to him if he failed than if
he submitted, while Nero with his degenerate
following were easily to be overcome. But the
indolent and indifferent Piso was destitute of
the imagination that might have brought such
an attempt to a successful issue. Without await-
ing the band of soldiers sent by the emperor
to arrest him — a band chosen from among the
most recent recruits, since the fidelity of the
veterans in such an employment was suspect —
he opened his veins and died, having first drawn
up a will wherein in terms of fulsome adulation
he made a large legacy to the emperor, in the
hope of thereby securing a peaceful succession
to the rest of his estate for the beautiful wife
whom he had stolen from a friend. There fol-
lowed a great proscription of conspirators real
or alleged, conducted with great cruelty by
Tigellinus, actively assisted b}/ his colleague,
Fenius Rufus, who hoped by the zeal with which
he prosecuted his late accomplices to clear him-
self from all suspicion of a share in their guilt.

Whether or how far Seneca was cognisant of
this conspiracy must remain uncertain, nor does
Tacitus express an opinion on the subject. That
the friend of Piso, the uncle of Lucan, would
have rejoiced at its success we cannot doubt,
just as Cicero rejoiced at the Ides of March.
But, Uke Cicero, he was probably not consulted

i6o SENECA

beforehand, and even if the evidence drawn by
fear of torture from Scevinus was accurate, it
only went to show that he was indirectly sounded
on Piso's behalf and returned an ambiguous
answer. We are told, indeed, by the untrustworthy
historian Dion Cassius that Seneca was deeply
concerned in the conspiracy, and that he declared
that it was necessary to rescue the State from
Nero and Nero from himself, but this seems to
be merely an adapted quotation of a general
maxim in the treatise De Vita Beata. However
this may be, the discovery of the plot proved
the ruin of Seneca, for it gave Nero the long-
coveted opportunity of effecting the destruction
of a mentor whom he hated ever the more the
more he departed from his precepts and merited
a disapproval which was not concealed.

The remainder of the story may be tran-
scribed without paraphrase from Tacitus, since,
if we except the brief and malignant narrative
of Dion — an historian who ever gives proof of
an envious dislike of great men and a desire to
belittle them — he is the only extant authority
for the last scene of Seneca's life.^

Then came the death of Annaeus Seneca, which
gave great joy to Nero : not that he had any clear
evidence of his guilt, but because he could now do by
the sword what he had failed to do by poison. The
sole witness against him was Natalis, and his evidence
only came to this, that he had been sent to see Seneca
when ill, and to complain of his refusing to see Piso : ' It
would be better,' he had said, ' for such old friends to

1 I have ventured to borrow Mr. G. G. Ramsay's excellent
translation.

THE CONSPIRACY OF PISO i6i

keep up their habits of intercourse.' To this Seneca
had replied : ' Frequent meetings and conversations
would do neither of them any good : but his own welfare
depended on Piso's safety.'

Gavius Silvanus, Tribune of a Praetorian Cohort,
was ordered to take the report of this incident to Seneca,
and to ask him, ' Whether he admitted the correctness
of the question of Natalis, and of his own answer to it ? '
Either by chance or purposely, it happened that Seneca
was returning on that day from Campania, and had
halted at a suburban villa four miles from Rome. Thither,
towards evening, the tribune proceeded ; and having
surrounded the house with soldiers, he delivered the
emperor's message to Seneca when he was at table
with his wife Pompeia Paulina and two friends,

Seneca's reply was : ' Natalis had been sent to
complain on behalf of Piso that he was not permitted
to visit him ; and he had tendered in excuse the state
of his health and his love of quiet. As to his reason
for regarding the welfare of a private individual as of
more value than his own safety, he had had none. He
was not a man addicted to flattery : and that no one
knew better than Nero himself, who had more often
found him too free than too servile in his utterances.'
On receiving this report from the tribune in the presence
of Poppaea and Tigellinus, who formed the emperor's
inner council of cruelty, Nero asked, ' Was Seneca pre-
paring to put an end to himself ? ' The tribune de-
clared that he had observed no sign of alarm or dejection
in Seneca's face or language. He was therefore ordered
to go back and tell him he must die. Fabius Rusticus
states that the tribune did not return by the same
road by which he had come, but that he went out of
his way to see Faenius, the prefect ; and having shown
him Caesar's order, asked him, ' Should he obey it ? '
and that Faenius, with that fatal weakness which had
come over them all, told him to execute his orders.
For Silvanus himself was one of the conspirators, and
he was now adding one more crime to those which he

M

i62 SENECA

had conspired to avenge. But he spared his own eyes
and tongue, sending in one of the centurions to announce
to Seneca that his last hour was come.

Seneca, undismayed, asked for his will ; but this the
centurion refused. Then turning to his friends, he
called them to witness that, ' Being forbidden to requite
them for their services, he was leaving to them the sole,
and yet the noblest, possession that remained to him —
the pattern of his life. If they bore that in mind, they
would win for themselves a name for virtue as the reward
of their devoted friendship.' At one moment he would
check their tears with conversation ; at another he
would brace up their courage by high-strung language
of rebuke, asking, ' Where was now their philosophy ?
Where was that attitude towards the future which
they had rehearsed for so many years ? To whom was
Nero's cruelty unknown ? What was left for one who
had murdered his mother and his brother but to slay
his guardian and teacher also ? '

Having discoursed thus as if to the whole company,
he embraced his wife, and abating somewhat of his
tone of high courage, he implored her to moderate her
grief, and not cling to it for ever : ' Let the contemplation
of her husband's hfe of virtue afford her noble solace
in her bereavement.'

She, however, announced her resolve to die with
him ; and called on the operator to do his part. Seneca
would not thwart her noble ambition ; and he loved
her too dearly to expose her to insult after he was gone.
' 1 have pointed out to thee,' he said, ' how thou mayest
soothe thy life ; but if thou prefer a noble death, I will
not begrudge thee the example. Let us both share the
fortitude of thus nobly dying : but thine shall be the
nobler end.'

A single incision with the knife opened the arm of
each, but as Seneca's aged body, reduced by spare
living, would scarcely let the blood escape, he opened
the veins of his knees and ankles also. Worn out at
last by the pain, and fearing to break down his wife's

THE CONSPIRACY OF PISO 163

courage by his suffering, or to lose his own self-command
at the sight of hers, he begged her to move into another
chamber. But even in his last moments his eloquence
did not fail ; he called his secretaries to his side, and
dictated to them manj^ things which being pubhshed
in his own words I deem it needless to reproduce.

Nero, however, had no personal disHke to Paulina ;
and, not wishing to add to his character for cruelty,
he ordered her death to be stayed. So, at the bidding
of the soldiers, the slaves and freedmen tied up her
arms and stopped the flow of blood ; perhaps she was
unconscious. But with that alacrity to accept the
worst version of a thing which marks the vulgar, some
believed that so long as she thought Nero would be
implacable she clutched at the glory of sharing her
husband's death ; but that when the hope of a reprieve
presented itself the attractions of life proved too strong
for her. She lived on for a few years more, worthily
cherishing her husband's memory ; but the pallor of
her face and hmbs showed how much vitality had gone
out of her.

Meanwhile Seneca, in the agonies of a slow and
lingering death, implored Statius Annaeus, his tried
and trusted friend and physician, to produce a poison
with which he had long provided himself, being the
same as that used for public executions at Athens. The
draught was brought and administered, but to no purpose ;
the limbs were too cold, the body too numb, to let the
poison act. At last, he was put into a warm bath ; and
as he sprinkled the slaves about him he added : ' This
libation is to Jupiter the Liberator ! ' He was then
carried into the hot vapour bath, and perished of suffoca-
tion. His body was burnt without any funeral ceremony,
in accordance with instructions about his end which
he had inserted in his will in the heyday of his wealth
and power.

CHAPTER XIII

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SENECA

The practical and unsystematic character of
Seneca's philosophy makes it less easy to describe
than to understand. Its chief aim was the forma-
tion of character, and his pupils were taught to
possess their souls in peace by the acceptance,
so far as they were applicable to actual life, of
Stoic principles. Philosophy, he says, is not a
popular profession devised for ostentation or the
display of ingenuity ; it lies not in words, but in
realities. Nor do we pursue it in order to spend
our days agreeably or to banish weariness from^'
our leisure ; it cultivates and forms the mind,
orders life, guides our actions by showing us
what to do and what not to do, sits at the helm
and directs our course through the changes and
chances of the world. What is the one true,
possession of man ? Himself, answers Seneca.
What is Liberty ? — to be the slave of no want,
of no chance, to meet Fortune on equal terms ;
but if a man desire or fear external things he is
so far the slave of him who has them to give or
to withhold.

Among the external things to be regarded ob-

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SENECA 165

jectively as neither good nor evil in themselves,
save through the opinion we form of them, must
be reckoned in Seneca's philosophy our own ""
bodies, in which as in boats we travel so strangely . \
from port to port. In these bodies is sown the \>^\2
divine seed which develops or decays, according -^
to the soil in which it is planted and the cultiva-
tion it receives. If the seed prospers and a reason-
able soul is engendered this is the real man-spirit
still cleaving, like a sun-ray, to its divine origin,
and his body but the case in which the jewel lies,
indispensable certainly to his appearance in the
physical world, as the instrument is indispensable
to the heard melody, but no more the source from
which he springs than the violin on which it is
played is that of a sonata of Beethoven, or the
ground on which the sun's rays shine is that of light. ^
This complete separation in thought of our spiritual '; :
selves from the few pounds of matter in which < Xv^L
we are clothed, and through which we act and j
suffer, lies at the root of the Stoic conception of
happiness and wisdom, which indeed in their
opinion are the same. We are only as miserable /
as we think ourselves. We are free, because all
our actions are in our own power, and if we are
ready to sacrifice our external possessions, includ-
ing among them our bodies, rather than lose this
freedom, it cannot be taken from us. Other men /

* ' Animus : sed hie rectus, bonus, magnus. Quid aliud voces
hunc, quam Deum in humano corpora hospitantem ? Hie
animus tarn in equitem Romanum, quam in libertinum, quam
in servum potest cadere. Quid est eques Romanus, aut
libertinus, aut servus ? Nomina ex ambitione, aut ex injuria
nata' {Ep. 31).

i66 SENECA

may have power over our bodies — indeed every
man has that if he chooses to exert it without
regard to consequences — they can have none over
ourselves. ' Vindica te tibi ' — claim to be lord of
yourself, make good your claim to be free for
your own sake, subject not 3^our will to another's,
wrote Seneca in the first of his letters to Lucilius,
and the remaining series are largely a commentary
on that text,
f Philosophy, as Seneca understood it, is the
) study of the works of God and of the nature of
/ man ; of natural science and of the moral law.
^ He would have understood and assented to the
saying of the modern sage who declared that
the two great subjects of his admiration and
reverence were the starry heaven outside him
and the moral law within. Man's nature he held
to be twofold — an inherited instinctive or physical
nature which he shares with the animals, and a
rational nature which is divine. The last is the
proper or distinguishing character of man, and
only so far as it gains the mastery can he truly
be said as man to live. The end of philosophy
is to secure this predominance, and so far as it
succeeds in so doing man is placed beyond the
, power of Fortune and his felicity is assured.
His good and evil reside in the choice which it is
always in his power to make. External things —
his own body included — are in themselves neither
good nor evil, but they are the material out of
which man makes the one or the other. ' They
reach not unto the soul,' as Marcus Aureiius
says, ' but stand without still and quiet, and

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SENECA 167

it is from the opinion only which is within that
all the tumult and all the trouble doth proceed.'
It is excellent, wrote Seneca, to combine the free-
dom from concern of a God with the physical
frailty of man.^ All nature is one. We are all
members of a single great body.^ In the physical
world this is clear to the view, for the actual
material of which it is composed is used successively
for all things — for minerals, for plants, and for
animals. But it is also true of the spiritual world
to which man alone of living things has been
granted admission. Hence it follows that we are
called by our spiritual nature to recognise our
universal kinship and to love one another, hence
come our notions of equity and justice, and a
belief which consciously or unconsciously we must
hold that it is better for a man to be wronged
than to wrong.

Thus Seneca was a dualist. For him, as has
been said, there is the world of matter of which
our bodies__are_a part, and there is the world of
spirit "wEich isjdLvine. Bodies are the instruments
of our free action when we possess ourselves, but
when we obey their behests we lose our freedom
and become the slaves of those who can threaten
us with or save us from the perils to which the
body is exposed — poverty, sickness, or external
violence. Of these we dread the last most because
of its tumultuous onset, whereas the others creep
silently upon us accompanied by nothing formid-

^ Ep- 53- 'Ecce res magna, habere imbecillitatem hominis,
securitatem Dei.'

^ Ep. 95 : ' Omne hoc quod vides, quo divina et humana
conclusa sunt, unum est : membra sumus corporis magni.'

i68 SENECA

able to our eyes or ears. Yet there is no difference
in respect of the sole physical realities — pain and
death. It was a Stoic maxim that the good of
man lies in a certain regulation of his choice with
regard to the appearances of things ; and it is
only in the spiritual world that this faculty of
choice can be said to exist. So far as the body
controls the human will in its own interests —
answering with corresponding reactions the stroke
of its perceptions and sensations — that will is
determined and becomes the servant of what it
should command. To obey the orders of the
body is to serve another's will and to surrender
that true liberty which to the Stoic was life itself.
Again and again Seneca recurs to this thesis :

My dearest Lucilius [he writes], do, 1 beseech you,
the one thing that can make you happy. Scatter and
tread under foot all those extrinsic splendours which
hang on the promises of others ; look to the true good,
and rejoice in what is your own. And what is that ?
Yourself, and the best part of yourself.l This little
body, even though nothing can be done without it,
is rather a necessary than a great matter.^

My body [he says in another letter] I regard but
as a chain by which my liberty is fettered. I offer
it therefore to Fortune as an object for her attacks ;
nor through this shield do I allow myself to be pierced.
In this is all my vulnerable part ; this frail and exposed
house does my soul inhabit inviolate. This flesh shall
never constrain me to fear or unworthy simulation.
Let me never lie for the sake of this poor carcase.^

^ Ep. 23.

2 Ep. 65 : ' Nunquam me caro ista compellet ad metum ;
nunquam ad indignam bono sinaulationem ; nunquam in honorem
hujus corpusculi mentiar.'

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SENECA 169

In Seneca's view a man cannot be said to live
a man's life who does not serve his own will.
He becomes an automaton acted on by the material
world outside him, on which he himself in his
turn reacts. True he cannot live for himself
unless he live for others,^ for we are all children
of the same Father, all members of one great
body ; but it is of his own free will that he must
live for others, and not through submission of
his will to theirs. All action is really voluntary.
No man need be a slave who is ready to take the
consequences to his body — pain or death at the
most — of a refusal to serve. The doctrine of the
divine immanence was held by Seneca as firmly
as was possible to an understanding so sceptical
and an imagination so mobile, and it lies at the
root of his theory of life.

There is no need to raise our hands to heaven [he
tells I^uciUus] or to prevail upon the keeper of the temple
to admit us to the presence of the image, as if by such
means our prayers were more likely to be heard. God
is near you, He is with you, He is within you. I tell
you, LuciUus, the Holy Spirit abides within us,^ watching
over and guarding our good or evil destiny : as we treat
Him, so He treats us. No good man is without God.
Can any unassisted by Him rise above Fortune ? Lofty
and sublime are His counsels. In every good man God
dwells, though what God is uncertain. ... If you see a
man unmoved by danger, unaffected by desires, happy
in adversity, calm in the midst of tempests, looking at
men from a higher station, at the gods from a level,

1 ' Qui sibi amicus est, scito hunc amicum omnibus esse
{Ep. 6). ' Alteri vivas oportet, si tibi vis vivere ' {Ep. 48).

* 'Sacer intra nos spiritus sedet, malorum bonorumque
nostrorum observator et custos.'

170 SENECA

will you feel no veneration for him ? Will you not
say, Here is something so great and so sublime that it
is incredible he should resemble the Httle body in which
he dwells ? . . . Just as the rays of the sun reach indeed
the earth yet are still in the place whence they are trans-
mitted : so a great and sacred soul sent down to the
earth, that we might have closer knowledge of divine
things, holds intercourse indeed with us but cleaves to
g, its own origin.^

At the same time Seneca was no believer in
extreme asceticism — a practice which he regarded
as a confusion of means with end. The body is
not to be indulged, lest like an overfed horse it
should get out of hand ; but since it is our instru-
ment of action, our only means of communication
with the outside world, since through it we enter
into relations with the external things that form
the materials on which, and the medium through
which, our choice can be exercised, we are to regard
it as a useful servant, and to clothe, clean, protect,
and maintain it in a manner suitable to its nature
and with a view to its highest efficiency. It is a
tool which we are to keep in good condition,
a house to be kept in repair ; but we must ever
be careful not to confound the tool with the work-
man, the house with its inhabitant.

Seneca held, as we have seen, that man's
characteristic excellence and peculiar attribute
is his reason, which is nothing but a part of the
divine nature sunk in a human body.^ Therefore
to follow reason is to act according to his nature ;
just as for other animals to follow the lead of
their bodies is to act after their kind. It is
^ Ep. 41. * Ep. 64.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SENECA 171

opposed to his physical, inherited, or irrational
self in respect of which he belongs to the world
of matter. Though this latter part of him has the
greater dynamic power, and has ever been the
source of the greater number of human actions,
yet inasmuch as body and the necessary actions
that proceed from bodily affections or passions —
whether hunger, fear, or lust — are not peculiar
to human beings but are common to them and
all other animals, we do not speak of them as
natural to man. Such words as ' humanity ' and
' kindness,' recurring as they do in many languages,
point to this distinction. It was ever in the
mind of the Roman Stoics, and is the foundation
upon which many of their seeming paradoxes rest.
In one of the very few allusions to Seneca to be
found in the writings of his actual contemporaiies,
we are told by the elder Pliny that no man was
less beguiled by the appearances of things —
' minime mirator inanium ' — and this indeed is
just what we might infer from his works. In spite
of the rhetoric by which they are sometimes
adorned, and sometimes disfigured, we hear and
recognise a familiar human voice in reading his
letters. The sense of remoteness which we feel
towards writers of past generations is proportioned
to the greater or less degree in which their nature
was subdued to the transient humours of the
time in which they worked. Shakespeare could
perceive and describe these humours — the strings
by which human puppets are moved — as clearly
as Ben Jonson, but because he could also perceive
and describe the universal humanity that lies

172 ■ SENECA

at the back of them, because he recognises the
something in every man that either controls or
checks or yields to them, his characters seem to us
modern and natural, and Jonson's, because he
cannot do this, mechanical and obsolete. Seneca,
with his constant desire to see with his own eyes
things as they are and not as they are reputed to be
— to remove the mask from things as well as from
persons — has the same power.^ We never have to
plead the opinions of his time as an apology for
any opinion he holds. We may agree with him
or disagree, but it is a Hving voice we hear — never
a mere echo. For Reason being universal and
absolute, independent of time and place, and of the
humours of mankind, the voice of Reason, no matter
from what distance of space or time, reaches us
as a living voice. We feel our kindred with the
speaker however great an interval may separate
us from his physical presence. We recognise
and greet in him our common nature, for this is
the true nature of man, the X0709 — the ' spirit '
of the New Testament as opposed to the ' flesh,'
the seed, the new birth, the divine spark, the real
humanity.

Seneca defines wisdom as constancy of will —
'semper idem velle atque idem nolle.' There is no
danger, he adds, lest this constancy should have a
wrong object, since it is impossible that anything
but what is right should at all times please us.
There must be but one same efficient motive to

^ Ep. 24 : ' Illud ante omnia memento, demere rebus
tumultum, ac videre quid in quaque re sit : scies nihil esse in
istis terribile nisi ipsum timorem. — Non hominibus tantum, sad
et rebus persona demenda est, et rgddenda fades sua.'

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SENECA 173

all our actions, and we shall never regret them
whatever their results. Actions, like things, are
in themselves neither good nor bad — it is the
manner and the circumstances that qualify them.
The veiy same action is base or honourable,
according to the mental disposition of the actor.
A man attends assiduously the sick bed of his
friend, and we approve. But if he does this with
a view to an inheritance, we regard him as a
vulture awaiting his prey. The action is the
same in both cases, but in the first we recognise
what we significantly call the man's humanity,
that is, goodness, truth, and beauty, those fruits
of the universal human spirit, of which man could
not have formed the idea were they not the very
material of his reasonable soul ; and our conscious-
ness of the self-regarding source of the same action
in the other case fills us with a certain disgust.
As with things so with actions, we must weigh
them without regard to their reputation, and con-
sider not what they are called but what they are.

Notwithstanding his rhetoric and antitheses,
it is this recall to reality which is the dominant
note in Seneca's writings. An excellent critic,
who was by no means an undiscriminating ad-
mirer of his subject, has written: 'The less a
man cares for the practical, the real, the less
he will value Seneca. The more a man envelops
himself in words and ideas without exact mean-
ing, the less will he comprehend a writer who
does not merely deal in words, but has ideas
with something to correspond to them.'^ Seneca

1 G. Long.

174 SENECA

had the contempt of a man of the world for
pedantry, though the impatience with pure
speculation that he felt as an ethical instructor
was tempered in some degree by his own insati-
able curiosity. ' We sometimes find,' he wrote
in one of his letters, ' that the pursuit of liberal
arts makes men tedious, wordy, unreasonable,
self-satisfied, and ignorant of what they should
know, just because they have learnt what is
needless.' ^ Philosophy, in his view, is the science
of reality, ' the knowledge of which the gods
have given to none,' he tells us, ' but the power
of attainment to all. Had they indeed made this
a common possession, had we been born wise,
wisdom would have lost her chief excellence and
have been subject to Fortune, whereas it is her
most precious and noble quality that she falls of
herself to no man's lot, that each man owes her
to himself, and seeks her from no other.' ^ This
acquisition of ' self-control in accordance with
fixed principles that are self-prescribed ' forms
what is called character, which, as Kant remarks,
implies a subject conscious of something which he
has himself acquired. The man who possesses
it is free, for he is the slave of nothing — of no
want, of no chance; he meets Fortune on equal
terms and can do what he pleases, for nothing
pleases him that he ought not to do. The
philosopher sees things as they are presented to
him by nature, not as they are represented to him
by his imagination worked on by the suggestion
of others. ' Above all things, remember,' writes

1 Ep. 88. 2 Ep. 90.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SENECA 175

Seneca, ' to strip things of their glamour and to
contemplate each as it is in itself: you will find
that they contain nothing formidable but your
own fear. ' ^ ' Non effedus sed efficientia timor
spectat,' he says elsewhere; it is the pomp and
circumstance of pain and death (the only positive
physical evils), not pain and death themselves,
which we fear, that is, from which we suffer in
anticipation. We think death the greatest of
evils, when the only evil connected with it is
one which vanishes on its appearance, namely,
the terror it inspires. We are indignant and
complain, and do not perceive that the only
reality of ill is to be found in our indignation
and complaints.

To have a right judgment in all things it is
sufficient to have our own judgment (or perception
of the differences between things) unbiased by
that of others ; then we acquire the inestimable
boon of becoming lords of ourselves. When a
man serves his own will and not other persons or
things he will do right, because he then acts on
general principles ; and general thoughts are just.
No man is a rogue for the pleasure of being a
rogue, but to gain some end which seems to him ,
a good one, but which to the philosopher would
not seem worth a struggle were it even attainable '
innocently. The slave of his passions may fancy
that in serving them he is serving his own will ;
but it is not so, for he has lost his self-control
and must obey those who are able to gratify or
not to gratify those passions. He is, as Hamlet

* Ep. 24.

176 SENECA

says, ' a pipe for Fortune's finger to sound what
stop she please.' One gift, says Seneca, we have
from Nature, and that is, that the hght of virtue
is visible to all ; even those who do not follow
perceive it ; but if we are not distracted by the
false opinions of things suggested to us from
outside or by our own bodily selves, to perceive
and to follow the light will be all one.^

Stoicism in the centuries before Christ was
like a motor started but off the clutch. There is
a great deal of potential energy, but being merely
potential it results in nothing but noise. Seneca
supplied the clutch to Stoicism by applying it to
the practical conduct of life, and he was followed
in this work by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.
Thus a statesman, a slave, and an emperor, differing
as widely in temperament as they did in position,
reached, nevertheless, the same conclusions as to
the nature of man and the secret of his felicity.
What the Greeks preach, the Romans practise,
says Quintilian — a greater matter.^ As was natural
to one who had lived in the centre of things and
seen much of men and affairs, Seneca felt little
but disdain for the logical and metaphysical puzzles
which occupied so much of the time and thought
of the earlier Greek philosophers and schoolmen,
and which seem to have had a great attraction
for his Epicurean friend, Lucilius. He reproaches
philosophers with teaching how to dispute rather
than how to live, and their pupils with attending

^ De Beneficiis, 717.

2 ' Quantum enim Graeci praeceptis valent, tantum Romani
(quod est majus) exemplis ' (Quintilian, xii. 2).

THE. PHILOSOPHY OF SENECA 177

lectures in order to sharpen their wits rather than
improve their characters. The most mischievous
of mortals he declares to be those who bring their
philosophy to market and by not practising what
they preach seem a living proof of the futility
of their doctrines. He argues with force against
those who maintained the sufficiency of general
principles and the needlessness of precepts for
their application to the conduct of life. Virtue,
he says, consists partly in theory and partly in
practice ; you ought both to learn and to make
good what you have learnt by your actions. If
this is so, the precepts of wisdom are of service as
well as her decrees ; they issue, as it were, edicts
by which our affections are bound and constrained.
The earlier philosophers were so occupied with
the form of the human understanding that they
neglected its material content. The driving power
was supplied but continued unlinked to the
engine to be driven. Seneca, too, considered the
external world but as the material of wise men —
the ball, not prized for its own sake, on which
the player is to exercise his skill — but to show
the bearing of this discovery on the actual
circumstances of life and action seemed to him
the main business of philosophy.

Not out of ivory only [he tells us] was Phidias skilled
in making statues, he made them of bronze ; if you
brought marble or any cheaper material to him he
would turn it to the best use of which it was capable.
So, if riches fall to him, the wise man wiU display his
wisdom amidst riches, if not, then in poverty ; if he
can, in his native country, if not, then in exile; if he

N

178 SENECA

can, as a general, if not, then as a soldier ; if he can,
in health, if not, then in sickness. Whatever fortune
befall him, he will carve out of it something memorable.^

The lives of most men are passed in a perpetual
struggle to improve the external circumstances
of their lives ; either their reputations — that is, the
opinions held of them by other people — or their
fortunes — that is, their power of directing the
labour of other people to the satisfaction of their
own desires and caprices. Thus for the sake of
an imagined life they lose their real life. Could
we recognise that the attainment of these objects
is not in our own power, and that even if by the
aid of Fortune they are attained they bring no
real happiness with them, but only through their
transitory nature disillusionment, we should accept
the chances and circumstances of our lives without
perturbation or care, use them as it befits us to
use them with the same tendency whatever they
are, and be at peace.

Seneca was a man of quick sympathies, im-
pressionable, witty, and amiable, humane, fasti-
dious, and full of good sense, interested perhaps
in man rather than in men, yet devoted to his
friends, and combining a desire to please and
success in pleasing, with a love of nature and
solitary meditation. He was a citizen of the
world,^ who could take a detached view of men and
things, and his generous conviction that distinctions
of rank and status had their origin in opinion,
itself the child of fortune, and in the names in

' Ep. 85.

* ' Non sum uni angulo natus ; patria mea totus hie est mundus.'

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SENECA 179

which that opinion was registered rather than in
any real superiority or inferiority, often led him
to anticipate the ideas of a very distant future.
Quintilian describes him as no great philosopher
('in philosophia parum diligens '), but praises him
as a moral instructor of distinction whose works
are to be studied — by those able to sift the good
from the bad — for the sake of the striking thoughts
with which they abound. He allows him a ready
wit, flowing perhaps too easily from a perennial
source, industry, and a wide knowledge of natural
history, though he remarks that he was some-
times misled by those whom he had commissioned
to make investigations ; but with all this he charges
him with an absolute lack of judgment and with
being the chief corrupter of eloquence and intro-
ducer of new methods in composition which utterly
unfitted him to guide the taste of the youth
of his generation, in whose hands for a time
his books alone were to be found. He denounces
him, indeed, as a sort of literary anarchist, whose
influence on the manner of his age was disastrous,
and having once again admitted that there was
much in his works to approve, much even to ad-
mire, by those who could distinguish (and for those
whose taste was sufficiently formed this, he says,
would be good practice), he sums up his criticism
with the remark that it was a pity one capable
of doing what he pleased should not more often
have been pleased with better things. ^ Quintilian,

^ ' Digna enim fuit ilia natura, quae meliora vellet, quae quod
voluit effecit.' One is reminded of Jonson's reply to Shakespeare's
fellow-players, who boasted that he had never blotted a line,
' "Would he had blotted a thousand.'

i8o SENECA

on conventional lines, was one of the best critics
that have ever passed judgment on the works
of others — the Sainte-Beuve of his age. But
Seneca was in literature a revolutionary, with a
dislike of convention, scant respect for tradition,
and impatience of authority ^ ; and Quintilian,
the classicist, was of opinion that he owed his
popularity not to his good qualities — the ' multae
et magnae virtutes ' which he freely recognised —
but to his dangerously attractive faults — his
rhetoric and his detached sentences, good, bad,
and indifferent, not woven according to the rules
of art into the texture of a complete work, but
scattered in careless profusion as they occurred
to him and lying where they fell. For Roman
conservatives such as Quintilian, Roman citizenship
was a primary consideration, and for a Roman
citizen moral obligations were in large measure
confined to their relations with their fellow-
citizens. For Seneca, on the other hand, and his
school, man was sacred to man as man ^ — the idea of
citizenship with its rights and duties was swallowed
up and lost in that of humanity, all men were
brothers and sprang from the same origin.^ The
most useful life a man could lead was spent in
helping, teaching, and consoling his fellow-men
— be they Romans or barbarians, free or slave.
The maxims in which Seneca enshrined these
notions seemed to Quintilian rhetorical common-
place calculated to please children and of a sub-

1 Ep. 33 : 'Non sumus sub rege, sibi quisque se vindicet.'
* Ep. 95 : 'Homo res sacra ho mini.'

» Cp. his contemporary, Pliny, ii. 7 : ' Deus est mortali
juvare mortalem ' ; and St- Paul passim.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SENECA i8i

versive tendency. Such ideas, he may have
thought, might be suited to the schools of declama-
tion; but introduced into serious treatises and
found in conjunction with much that was really just
and wise, they could not be too strongly condemned.

Was Seneca the author of the tragedies which
bear his name ? That they were written by him
or by one of his family we know from the quotation
by Quintilian of an extant line of the Medea,^
while other mentions are made of the tragedies of
' Seneca ' by the grammarians of the second century
— Terentianus Maurus, and Valerius Probus. It
is evident, however, that one of the plays, the
Odavia, cannot have been written by Lucius
Seneca, who appears in it as a principal character,
since it contains in the guise of a prophecy a
fairly accurate description of the death of Nero.''

Conceding this, most modern writers have never-
theless attributed the remaining eight tragedies
to the philosopher. Yet apart from the fact that
there seems no sufficient reason for separating
the Octavia from the rest of the collection, the
case against his authorship seems to me so strong
as to be almost conclusive. Quintilian, in his
account of Roman writers of tragedy from Accius
and Pacuvius down to Pomponius Secundus, whom
he had known personally, makes no mention of
Seneca. This, if at the time he was writing Seneca

1 ' Interrogamus, aut invidiae gratia : ut Medea apud Senecam
— " quas peti terras jubes ? " ' (Quint, ix. 2. 8).
* ' Veniet dies tempusque, quo reddat suis

Animam nocentem sceleribus, jugulum hostibus,
Desertus, et destructus, et cunctis egens.'

Oct. 629-631.

i82 SENECA

the tragedian were actually alive, is comprehensible,
for Quintilian avoids all criticism of his living
contemporaries, and only alludes without naming
him to Tacitus himself. But if Lucius Seneca
were the author of the plays, how could he have
passed him over in silence ? Moreover, he tells us
that Lucius Seneca practised almost every form
of literature, leaving behind him orations, poems,
epistles, and dialogues. Why no mention of the
tragedies ? But the strongest external reason
for disbelieving in the identity of Seneca the
tragedian with Seneca the philosopher is to be
found in the poem of Sidonius ApoUinaris, written
in the fifth century, in which he distinguishes
between the two.^ It is difficult to believe that
Sidonius, to whom letters were the chief interest
in life, and who lived in an age before the final
break up of the Empire had cast a doubt on so
many origins, could have been mistaken on such
a point. He writes, too, as he naturally would if
no question on the subject had been raised, as if
the matter were one of common knowledge.

As to the internal evidence, the defects of
Seneca are visible in the plays, tempered by few

1 ' Non quod Corduba praepotens alumnis
Facundum ciet, hie putes legendum :
Quorum unus colit hispidum Platona,
Incassumque suum monet Neronem :
Orchestram quatit alter Euripidis,
Pietum faeeibus AeSv^hylum secutus
Aut plaustris solitum sonare Thespin :
Qui post pulpita trita sub cothurno
Ducebant olidae matrem capellae.'

Carm. ix.

Cp. Carm. xxiii, : ' Quid celsos Seneeas loquar.'

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SENECA 183

of his better qualities. Quintilian says of the
later writers of that school, that all they can do
is to imitate and exaggerate the faults and manner-
isms of their master, since his real excellence is
beyond their capacity. By resembling they, so to
speak, slander him.^ I do not dwell upon the
absence of all allusion to the tragedies in his
letters, though he quotes Euripides and Publius,
for Seneca was completely free from that literary
vanity which was so conspicuous in Cicero, and
in no one of his letters does he mention any other
of his works. Indeed, with the exception of a
single passage in his twenty-first letter, in which
with a certain solemnity he promises Lucilius that
as Idomeneus lives for ever in the letters of
Epicurus, Atticus in those of Cicero, so it was
also in his power to confer immortality on his
own correspondent, we hear nothing of his great
position and reputation from himself.

The denunciations of tyrants and tyranny with
which the plays abound, and the direct references,
as they appear to be, to Seneca's own relations
with Nero which they contain, have appeared to
M. Boissier conclusive evidence of his authorship.
But they also make it in a high degree unlikely that
the plays were published during Nero's lifetime,
and would rather indicate their publication under
Vespasian by another member of Seneca's family.
' He who distributes crowns at his will,' we read
in the Thyestes, ' before whom trembling nations
bend the knee, who by a sign of his hand disarms

^ One wonders whether he may not have had Seneca the
tragedian among others in his mind when so writing.

i84 SENECA

Medes, Indians, and tribes dreaded of the Parthians,
is himself uneasy on his throne ; he shudders at
the thought of the caprices of fortune and of the un-
foreseen strokes by which empires are overthrown.' ^
Again, in the same play, ' Believe me, we are
deceived by the glozing surface of prosperity, and
we are wrong indeed to regret its loss. While
I was powerful, I never ceased to tremble ; but
now I can cause fear or jealousy to none, I am
happy. Crime does not seek out the poor man
in his hut. He dines at a modest table, whereas
we run the risk of poison when we drink from
golden goblets. I speak from experience.' ^ It is
evident that the writer of these passages had Nero
and Seneca in his mind; Seneca had indeed ex-
perienced the danger he describes,^ but that he
would have published or even committed to writ-
ing such sentiments in the tyrant's lifetime is
hard to believe. Who, then, can be the author of
the plays ? Seneca's brothers did not long survive
him. His nephew Lucan was condemned ; and as
the blood spurted from his opened veins with his
dying voice he declaimed a passage from the Phar-
salia descriptive of his situation. His father, Mela,
claimed his estate; but the claim was contested
by Lucan's intimate friend, Fabius Romanus, who
professed to find among the papers left him letters
involving Mela in the conspiracy. This was
enough for Nero, who coveted Mela's great wealth,
and a message was sent him, with the usual
result. He at once anticipated a condemnation
by opening his veins, leaving behind him a will

* Thyestes, 600. * Ibid., 446. ^ Tac, Ann. xv. 45.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SENECA 185

in which he bequeathed a great sum of money to
TigeUinus^ in the hope that by interesting the pre-
fect in the vahdity of the document his remaining
legacies might be secured to his family. That
he was successful in this is probable, because a
generation later we find Lucan's widow, PoUa,
living wealthy and honoured under Domitian, and
receiving the seldom disinterested attentions of
the Flavian poets. Gallio, after Seneca's death,
was violently attacked in the Senate ; but saved
for the moment by friends, who reproached his
antagonist with taking advantage of the public
misfortunes for the gratification of private hatred
and opposing the humane impulses of their merciful
prince. We hear no more of him from Tacitus ;
but Dion relates that he perished shortly after-
wards by his own hand. The only other Seneca
of whom any mention has survived is Marcus,
the son of the philosopher, of whom he wrote so
tenderly from his Corsican exile. Can he have
been the dramatist ? Nothing obliges us to
believe it ; but it is possible, and has been
believed.

Seneca's reputation has passed through many
vicissitudes. He has been long neglected, and
his character when discussed has been harshly
appreciated. Yet good wine cannot come from
a tainted vessel ; and if we judge his work by the
use that has been made of it by famous poets
and moralists, we must call it a noble heritage.
Shakespeare and Milton have transmuted many
of his thoughts into glorious poetry — Milton
taking directly from him, Shakespeare in all

i86 SENECA

probability by way of Florio's Montaigne. From
the first he has excited admiration and hostihty
in almost equal measure. He is perhaps the
only pagan whom the early Christian writers —
Tertullian, Augustine, Lactantius, and Jerome —
regarded with all but unmixed approval. On
the other hand, the pedantic Roman archaists of
the Antonine period — Aulus Gellius and Fronto —
detested him as the corrupter of taste and a
dangerous innovator. It must always be remem-
bered that his was no abstract philosophy of the
study. It was addressed by a former man of
action to men living under a reign of terror,
whose lives were in daily peril ; and its object was
to free them from anxiety and brace their minds
to meet their fate with indifference and dignity.
Consequently it is in dangerous times that he
has found the greatest favour.

CAIUS MAECENAS

CAIUS MAECENAS

The battle of Actium had been fought and won.
For the third time in Roman history the gates of
the Temple of Janus were closed as a sign that
war had ceased. After a century of civil war and
confusion the Romans accepted, some of them
with joy, others with a half-ashamed relief, others
again with melancholy resignation, the repose
and security offered to them by the new govern-
ment. The historian Livy, whom the emperor
was accustomed playfully to tax with his Pom-
peian sympathies, turned, as he tells us, to the
composition of Roman history and the contem-
plation of the ancient glories of the State in order
to distract his mind from what seemed to him
the incurable degeneracy of the times. Horace,
who had served as an officer under Brutus at
Philippi, took refuge in Epicurean philosophy
and the cultivation of friendship, while he advised
his friends to rid themselves of hopes and fears,
to make the best of the passing hour, and not to
trouble about the future. We must all die : so
what, after all, does anything matter ? is the
constant burden of his song. ReconciUation and

190 CAIUS MAECENAS

oblivion were the order of the day. To the son
of that Cicero, the thunder of whose eloquence
in defence of the old constitution had cost him
his life, fell the duty as consul of announcing to
the people the news of the battle of Actium and
of presiding over the games and pageants given
in honour of the victory. The untamable soul
of Cato was applauded with impunity by the
Court poets. Men, like Messala, who had distin-
guished themselves on the republican side in the
civil war were admitted to the intimacy of the
emperor ; and the letter of the old constitution
was preserved inviolate at a time when its spirit
was fundamentally subverted.

Augustus seems really to have been by tem-
perament a conservative. He cared little for the
pomp and circumstance of power, and was under
no temptation to imitate those excesses of uncon-
stitutional language and demeanour, the fatal
candour of which had proved more disastrous
to his uncle Julius Caesar than the most violent
of his actions. He knew that wounded vanity
is a more potent factor in the making of patriots
than loss of liberty. Moreover, he was attached
to the Roman traditions and religion ; he was a
lover of order, system, and decorum ; he had the
historical sense ; he had an admirable taste in
literature ; he was an indulgent friend ; and
he loved the freedom from restraint in social
intercourse secured with such difficulty by
princes.

When Augustus returned from his final vic-
tory at Actium, he contemplated a genuine

CAIUS MAECENAS 191

restoration of the republic ; and to this course
he was urged by his most powerful lieutenant,
Marcus Agrippa. But he was dissuaded from
adopting it by his other chief adviser, the Tuscan
knight, Caius Maecenas, who, left in charge of
the city while the emperor was still absent, had
recently increased his influence by his skilful sup-
pression in its inception of a conspiracy against
his master's life, formed by Lepidus, the son of
the triumvir.^

The character of this celebrated man is in
itself an interesting study ; and, typically dif-
fering as it does from that of all the public men
in earlier Roman history, it enables us to appreciate
more clearly the nature of the change that came
over Roman life after the accession of Augustus
to sole power, and to weigh with more intelli-
gence the advantages and disadvantages of that
change.

Maecenas, in the first place, was a great rea-
list. He professed and probably felt nothing but
disdain for all good and evil derived not from
things themselves, but from the opinions men
form of them. Thus, though proud of his old
Etruscan lineage, he would never consent to enter
the Senate or to hold the official honours — now
become in the main titular — of praetor or consul.
He died^as he was born^ in the equestrian order.
It is indeed possible that his moderation in this
matter was in part a compliment to the em-
peror, who, himself descended from an equestrian
family in which his father had been the first

1 Yell. Paterculus, ii. 88 ; Appian, iv. 49.

192 CAIUS MAECENAS

senator, was not at all ashamed to avow the fact
in his published memoirs ^ ; and this theory
receives some support from the circumstance
that the successor of Maecenas in the confidence
of Augustus, Crispus Sallustius, followed his ex-
ample in this respect, as he did in his luxurious
way of living — ' diversus a veterum instituto ' - —
and in his Melbournesque pose of indolence and
indifference. None the less were his contem-
poraries astonished by the modesty of Maecenas,
there being no prior instance in Roman history of
a public man who enjoyed all the reality without
any of the titular distinctions of power. What-
ever its real origin, this much-commended ab-
stention from the honours of the State can have
caused the statesman little effort. His pene-
trating vision pierced through the appearances of
things to their essence, and so all those dignities
which owed their importance to the vain opinions
of mortal men were to him as nothing. ' Nil
admirari prope res est una.' Perhaps it was of
Maecenas that Horace was thinking when he
wrote that celebrated line.

His, again, was the tolerant temperament often
found to spring from complete scepticism. Of
the substantial well-being of his fellow-men he
was sincerely desirous. But he did not think
this likely to be promoted by the restoration of
their ancient liberties. His good-nature, like
that of Sir Robert Walpole, was the child
of his low opinion of human nature — of his

* Suet., Oct. 2. * Tac, Ann. iii. 30.

CAIUS MAECENAS 193

pessimism. He expected little from the virtues
of others, and therefore felt no anger when their
actions did not exceed his expectations. With
idealism he had no sympathy. He cared for
nothing but the actual and the tangible. The
only way in which he showed his power, we are
told by a hostile critic, was by doing as he pleased
— by his contempt for appearances. Romans of
the old school were shocked to see him lounging
about the streets of Rome at a time when, in the
absence of Augustus, his power in that city was
absolute, with his robe hanging loosely about him
and a hood pulled over his head leaving his ears
exposed ; like a fugitive slave in a comedy, so
they said.^ For the fate of his body after death
he felt a very characteristic indifference. ' Nee
tumulum euro : sepelit Natura relicfos,' ^ he wrote
in one of the few Unes of his poetry that have
been preserved to us. What to him was a grave
or a monument ? Life was the great reality ;
death the negation of life. And accordingly he
clung to Hfe with a passionate and pathetic
insistence which to the Stoic Seneca appeared
contemptissimus, but from another point of
view may even be regarded as heroic. ' Torture
my body,' he cries in the well-known lines to
Fortune, ' rack me with gout ; break and distort
my Hmbs ; nail me to a cross ; grant me but
Life, and it is well.' Seneca has generally been
echoed, and these verses have been often quoted
to show the innate effeminacy of Maecenas ; but
how do they differ, save by inferior expression,

* Seneca, Ep. 114. * Id., Ep. 92.

194 CAIUS MAECENAS

from the great lines which Milton puts into the
mouth of Belial ?

Who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being.
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night
Devoid of sense and motion ?

However, that Maecenas was really self-
indulgent and over-luxurious in his manner of
life is, of course, undeniable. All the Roman
authorities are agreed upon this point. Epicu-
reanism was the fashionable philosophy of the
time, and there can be little doubt that of this
fashion the indolent statesman was a principal
leader. He disliked forms and despised conven-
tions. The small Roman banquets, with their
wines and their sweet ointments, their music and
their roses, were clearly delightful to him. He
forgave the numerous infidelities of his beautiful
wife Terentia ; and although he often divorced
her he as often took her back, thinking perhaps
that to act otherwise would be to fling away the
substance of his pleasure for a shadow. But,
realist though he was, the fact that the emperor,
to whom he was sincerely attached, was among
her lovers appears to have troubled his declining
years. He forgave Augustus, nevertheless, and
bequeathed to him the greater part of his pos-
sessions. Velleius Paterculus tells us that though
provident and energetic enough when something
definite had to be done, as soon as the business
in hand ceased to be urgent he relapsed into an

CAIUS MAECENAS 195

indolence and softness more than feminine.^ He
delighted in the games of the Campus Martius.
His friends he chose from inclination and without
respect of persons from among the poets and wits
of his time ; his acquaintance with a view to
amusement. Horace describes a dinner-party at
the house of the rich parvenu Nasidienus at
which Maecenas was present attended by two
boon companions (umbrae). For the diversion
of the great man the pomposity and vanity of
the host were ruthlessly exploited by his two
followers under the forms of politeness ; the
noise increased as the wine circulated ; and the
feast came to an end amid riotous buffoonery.*
We see him, through the eyes of Propertius,
driving through Rome in a cunningly- wrought two-
wheeled chariot of a kind lately imported from
Britain ^ ; while at other times he would forget
the cares of State and dine merrily with Horace
' sine aulaeis et ostro ' at the Sabine farm which
the poet owed to his munificence.

The Palace of Art, the construction of which
as an habitation for his soul was the object of
Maecenas's later life, proved, as we shall see, but
a crumbling and unstable edifice. But in the
meantime it demanded a splendid material en-
vironment, and this he provided by his house and
gardens on the Esquihne. Here he transformed
the old Roman plebeian cemetery into a park,
famous through many succeeding generations;
and here he built a lofty tower, from the sunmiit
of which he would spend hours in contemplating

1 ii. 88. « Hon, Sai. ii. 8. » Prop. ii. i.

196 CAIUS MAECENAS

the beautiful prospect of the Campagna with the
slopes of Tibur in the distance and nearer at hand
the fume and fret and riches of the Eternal
City.^ Maecenas was a valetudinarian, with a
horror of death. He was a victim to acute
insomnia. The elder Pliny assures us that for
the last three years of his life he never enjoyed
a moment's sleep ^ ; and, quite incredible as this
statement may be, even its approximate accuracy
is quite enough to account for the ceaseless
complaints with which, as we know from Horace,
he was accustomed to overburden his friends.
Ingenuity was exhausted to devise a remedy for
this terrible affliction. The sound of falling
waters, the choicest wines, the music of sym-
phonies gently rising and falling in the distance —
* symphoniarum cantum ex longinquo lene re-
sonantium ' — all were vain.' The tower itself —
standing amid its vast gardens and orchards —
was a centre of quiet. There Augustus took
refuge when attacked by illness ; thither came
the unsocial and unhappy Tiberius to rest his eyes
from the hated sight of his fellow-men ; there
Nero sang in costume the story of burning Troy
as he watched with aesthetic delight the flames
that were consuming his ill-fated capital. Such
was the retreat chosen by Maecenas, when he
obtained the emperor's permission to retire from
public life and to seek what Tacitus calls a sort
of peregrinum otium within the city. Here he
entertained the poets to whom he owes most of

^ Hor., Od. iii. 29. » Pliny, Hist. Nat. vii, 52.

» Sen., De Prov. iii. g.

CAIUS MAECENAS 197

his fame, and here he held close intercourse with
the pure spirit of Virgil, to whom he had pre-
sented a house on the Esquiline close to his own.
Augustus, in one of the pleasant letters to him
happily preserved to us by Suetonius, declares
his wish to steal from him Horace, whom he de-
sires to engage as a private secretar3^ ' Veniet
ergo' he writes, ' ah ista parasitica mensa ad
hanc regiant, et nos in scrihendis episfolis juvabit '
(' Let him quit that parasitic table of yours for
our palace, and he shall help us with our corre-
spondence ' ^) . But Horace declined the proposal ;
and Augustus, ever reasonable, had the good sense
not to be offended. Both Horace and Virgil,
however, much preferred the country to the town,
and their patron, sorely against his will, was
obliged to indulge their inclinations in this respect.
Maecenas had evidently a genius for friend-
ship. We read that a certain Melissus, a dis-
tinguished grammarian, although free-born, had
been exposed in his infancy by his mother and
brought up as a slave. He became of the house-
hold of Maecenas, and was by him treated rather
as a friend than as a servant. Afterwards, his
mother, repenting of her action, claimed him as
her son, and he was thus given the opportunity
of recovering his freedom. But, preferring to
liberty his actual condition in the service of
Maecenas, he rejected the proffered acknow-
ledgment. He was afterwards manumitted by
Maecenas, introduced to the emperor, and ap-
pointed librarian to the new Octavian Library.''

» Suet,, in vita Hor. » Suet,, De Illus. Gramm. 21,

198 CAIUS MAECENAS

It is often the case with men whose friendship
is valuable and enduring that their manner in
the early stages of acquaintance shows a certain
tentative reserve. The plant of genuine affection
between male friends is apt to be of slow growth.
Maecenas was no exception to this rule. Horace
tells us that when he was first introduced to
Maecenas, to whom he was recommended by
Virgil, he was received rather coldly and not
recalled for nine months. But from that time
onwards there seems to have been no break in a
mutual sympathy that ever increased. As a
friend Maecenas was no respecter of persons.
With the emperor he used a freedom which he
permitted to those who were more or less depen-
dent on himself. The well-known story of how,
when Augustus was sitting at the seat of justice
and about to condemn many men to death,
Maecenas, unable from the press to approach him,
threw to him a little scroll with ' Surge tandem
carnifex ' (' Rise, hangman ! ') written on it, and
how the emperor at once rose and left the tri-
bunal without another word, is equally credit-
able to both these friends. The lives of the
accused were spared, and the bold minister
gained rather than lost credit with his master.^
Nor did he lose his favour when, by his indis-
cretion in confiding to his wife Terentia the secret
of the discovery of Murena's conspiracy, he risked
the failure of the measures taken for its suppres-
sion. To his own dependents he extended the
indulgence received by him from the emperor.

* Dion Cassius, iv. 7

CAIUS MAECENAS 199

He was not offended when Horace broke his
promise of returning to Rome, and Hngered month
after month first in his Sabine farm and afterwards,
during the winter months, on the southern coast.
The poetic apology he earned from him would,
it is true, have soothed the indignation of most
men. ' Horati Flacci, ut mei, mentor esto '
('Remember Horace as you would myself),
was his last testamentary recommendation to the
emperor.^ Horace did not long survive him, and
was buried on the Esquiline close to his patron's
grave.

The patience of Maecenas was tried by the
rather feeble character of Propertius, and he used
often to urge that poet to quit his lovelorn ditties
and compose something more worthy of his
talents. Propertius replied by citing his patron's
moderation in remaining a knight as an example
to others to confine themselves within modest
spheres of action.* Virgil was an even older
friend than Horace, but his shyness and taci-
turnity probably rendered their relations less
easy and unreserved. In the anonymous bio-
graphy of Virgil which has descended to us from
ancient times there are two replies made by the
poet to the minister which one would fain be-
lieve to be authentic. On one occasion he was
asked by Maecenas, characteristically enough, ' Is
there anything, Virgil, that man can possess with-
out satiety ? ' ' In everything,' was the reply,
' staleness or abundance produces disgust — except
in understanding.' At another time Maecenas

1 Suet., in vita Hor. * Prop. iii. 9.

200 CAIUS MAECENAS

asked him in what manner it was profitable to
enjoy and preserve great gifts of fortune. Virgil
replied : ' Then only when a man is ambitious to
surpass others as greatly in justice and liberality
as he does in wealth and honours.'

Maecenas was a copious author, but he prob-
ably did not attach much importance to his own
compositions. It is remarkable that among all
the compliments showered upon him by his para-
sitica mensa — by Horace, Virgil, and Propertius
— not one relates to his literary productions, and
it is a fair inference that his vanity was not much
interested in their success. He was as indifferent
to the literary as he was to the political traditions
of Rome. The nova elocutio which he introduced
into his poetry, the transpositions of words from
their natural places for the sake of effect, the
preciosities of his style, were derided by his
contemporaries, and cited by later critics like
Seneca and Quintilian as the classical examples
of this kind of vicious composition.^ The few
specimens of his poetry that have descended to
us abundantly bear out the charge, though it
must be remembered that, for the most part,
they are expressly cited with that object. The
severe taste of Augustus, who equally disliked the
affected imitation of old writers by the use of
obsolete words, and the over-ornate and eccentric
manner of the new school, did not spare the
euphemisms and quaintnesses of the minister's
style. Macrobius has preserved for us the end
of a letter from the emperor to Maecenas in

* Sen., Ep. 19, 114 ; Quint, ix. 4.

CAIUS MAECENAS 201

which he parodies his friend's style with happy
effect : ' Vale mel gentium,' so it runs, ' melcule,
ebur ex Hetruria, laver Aretinum, adamas super-
nus, Tiberinum margaritum, Cilniorum smaragde,
jaspis figulorum, berylle Porsennae, carbunculum
Italiae.' ^ Maecenas's love of precious stones, of
which we have evidence in some surviving hen-
decasyllables addressed by him to Horace, is also
rallied in this letter. Seneca, to whom we owe
much of our scanty knowledge of Maecenas, tells
us that his writings were often great in their
meaning, but enervated by their expression.^

The change effected in the Roman character
at the close of the first century before Christ, with
its subsequent developments, offers an interesting
study to the philosophic historian. The house
was completed, the architects who had superin-
tended its completion had fought for its posses-
sion, into which the strongest of them had finally
entered. The employment which had absorbed
the lives of the workmen was at an end, and now
their unemployed descendants began to look about
them and to wonder what they were to do next.
In fact, the cultivated Romans, having for the
first time leisure to remember that they were
alive, began the dangerous search for theories of
life. Philosophy, which, as we learn from Cicero,
was still in his time by many considered a study
below the dignity of a Roman gentleman, now
began powerfully to attract the attention of the
educated classes, and the writings of the Greek
philosophers were eagerly discussed. Stoicism,
» Mac, Sat. ii. 4 » Ep. 92-

202 CAIUS MAECENAS

with its seeming paradoxes, appealed very little at
first to the downright Roman mind. A love of the
palpable and a contempt for subtlety were among
its prominent characteristics. The via media of
the Peripatetics found more favour, but men in
search of a new belief do not readily adopt com-
promises, which spring from the attempt to adapt
to new conditions an old creed that we are loth
to desert. But Epicureanism, which professed
to base itself upon common sense and the direct
testimony of the senses, and which swept im-
patiently away the whole paraphernalia of logic
with its definitions and distinctions, progressed
with amazing rapidity. Bodily pleasure, cried
the Epicureans, is the ultimate good ; and a
respectable life is to be recommended, because
without it bodily pleasure becomes impossible.
Pain is the only real evil ; other so-called ills are
the artificial creations of opinion. The foolish
are tossed to and fro on the phantasmal waves
of hopes and fears ; let them pull themselves
together and shake off the dream, and they will
find themselves on dry land. By the study of
unsophisticated beasts we may see nature as in a
mirror ; let us imitate them, and no longer groan
under the tyranny of convention. The opposite
of pain is exemption from pain, and this is the
highest enduring pleasure. Pain must often be
endured and even courted in order to avoid a
future greater pain, and pleasure sacrificed to the
attainment of a future greater pleasure. To attain
these objects courage is a useful and temperance
an essential quality. As objects in space appear

CAIUS MAECENAS 203

smaller or larger as they are nearer or more distant,
so do pleasures and pains in time. The function
of wisdom is to estimate their real magnitude,
and to correct by reason the errors induced by
the fallacious aspect which they offer to the
passions. The accessories of pleasure and pain
rather than the things themselves excite our hopes
and fears ; by philosophy these accessories will
be made to vanish, and the two objects — which
alone have a real existence — will be regarded in
their own naked proportions. Providence is a
myth ; the combination of atoms, which in
infinite time has formed man, is fortuitous ;
there is a continual passage of elements into
things and of things into elements ; the world
and all that therein is are things, and therefore
mortal ; nothing endures but the atoms of which
the number of shapes is limited, while in each
shape the number of atoms is infinite.

Though the contradictions and poverties in-
volved in this system were ably exposed by Cicero
in his book De Finibus, yet the tenets continued
to spread, and deeply affected the Roman char-
acter and history. Liberty now seemed an unsub-
stantial notion, an empty name, for which it was
the height of absurdity to suffer. Alone among
philosophers the Epicurean lecturers never alluded
in their discourses to the ancient heroes of Greece
and Rome. Atticus is a good specimen of the
best class of men who at this time adopted Epicu-
reanism. Living in accordance with his principles
in retirement at Athens, where his amiability
made him the idol of the people, he remained

204 CAIUS MAECENAS

throughout his life on the best terms with the
various party-leaders, nor did the assassination
of his friends appear to him a sufficient reason
for quarrelling with their assassins. Sylla and
Pompey, Marcus Brutus and Julius Caesar, Cicero
and Antony, and finally Octavius, were all in-
cluded in the list of his friends.

Suave etiam belli certamina magna tueri
Per campos instructa tua sine parte pericU.

Consistent to the end, he deliberately starved
himself to death in order to avoid the greater
pain of a lingering illness. The civil wars must
have appeared to him a melancholy absurdity,
useful only as they placed in more striking relief
his own philosophical tranquillity.

It is not difficult to account for the rapid
spread of the new philosophy among the Roman
upper classes. The miseries of the civil wars gave
reason to those who asserted their irrationality.
The contrast between the tangible enjoyments
possible under the strong imperial government
and the pains which were endured while Brutus
and Cato were still struggling for an idea was
made and registered by the practical Roman
mind. The Emperor Augustus, who regarded
life as a sorry play in which he was amused to
find that the principal part had fallen to himself,
Augustus, with his sceptical good sense and
moderation, encouraged to some extent the ideas
which afforded so effective a guarantee for the
stability of his government, though at times he
was alarmed at the progress they had made

CAIUS MAECENAS 205

and endeavoured to check them by precept and
example.

And his minister, Maecenas, found ready to
his hand a theory of Ufe which exactly accorded
with his own inclinations and habits of mind.
Cultured, luxurious, and good-natured, he disUked
stiffness, whether in manners, literature, or dress.
He was himself of noble birth, but believed the
distinctions of rank to be the creations of an
empty convention. His enjoyment of the plea-
sures of life has seldom been rivalled, and his
main departure from the principles of his school
lay in his consequent horror of death. He was
a man of great intellect, of an exquisite taste in
literature, and there was probably no affectation
in his laughing disregard of all the old Roman
conventions. Such was Maecenas ; and great
indeed must have been the change which had
passed over the genius of the Roman Common-
wealth when such a man could appear at its
head.

APPENDIX

Caius
Caesar

TABLE I

Augustus Imp. = (i) Claudia, (2) Scribonia, (3) Livia
Julia = (i) Marcellus, (2) M. Agrippa, (3) Tiberius

Lucius
Caesar

Agrippa
Postumus

Julia

I

L. Aemilius Agrippina (major)
Paulus — Gennanicus

Aemilia = (i) Claudius, (2) App.
Lepida | Junius Silanus

L. Silanus,
affianced to Octavia,
d. of Claudius

Nero

= Julia,
d. of Drusus,
the son of
Tiberius

I
Drusus

Caius Caligula
Imp.

Agrippina
Cn. Domitius

I
Nero Imp.

Drusilla Livil'

= M. Lepidus = M. Vi

TABLE II

Livia Drusilla = (i) Tiberius Claudius Nero, (2) Augustus

Tiberius Imp. = Vipsania Agrippina

I
Drusus

Drusus Claudius = Antonia (mino

Germanicus Tiberius Claudius ii
Agrippina minor. = Valeria Messa
See Table I |

TABLE III

Marcus Annaeus Seneca = Helvia

I
Britannicus Octa.

I

M. Annaeus

Novatus,
by adoption
Junius Gallio

Novatilla

Lucius Annaeus = (i) — (2) Pompeia
Seneca | Paulina

Marcus

M. Annaeus I

= Atilia

d. of Atilius Lu

of Corduba

I
M. Annaeus Lu'
the poet
= Polla Argen

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