LITMIR.BIZ

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equestrian order. He was of a weakly constitution; and bodily feebleness, as with many other great intellects, served to intensify if not originate, the activity of the mind. At Rome, with which he early made acquaintance, he soon gained great distinction at the bar; and the eloquence and fervour he displayed in the Senate before the Emperor Caligula excited the jealous hatred of that insane tyrant. Later in life he obtained a prætorship, and he was also appointed to the tutorship of the young Domitius, afterwards the Emperor Nero. On the accession of that prince, at the age of seventeen, to the imperial throne, Seneca became one of his chief advisers.

      Unfortunately for his credit as a philosopher, while exerting his influence to restrain the vicious propensities of his old pupil, he seems to have been too anxious to acquire, not only a fair proportion of wealth, but even an enormous fortune, and his villas and gardens were of so splendid a kind as to provoke the jealousy and covetousness of Nero. This, added to his alleged disparagement of the prince’s talents, especially in singing and driving, for which Nero particularly desired to be famous, was the cause of his subsequent disgrace and death. The philosopher prudently attempted to anticipate the will of Nero by a voluntary surrender of all his accumulated possessions, and he sought to disarm the jealous suspicions of the tyrant by a retired and unostentatious life. These precautions were of no avail; his death was already decided. He was accused of complicity in the conspiracy of Piso, and the only grace allowed him was to be his own executioner. The despair of his wife, Pompeia Paulina, he attempted to mitigate by the reflection that his life had been always directed by the standard of a higher morality. Nothing, however, could dissuade her from sharing her husband’s fate, and the two faithful friends laid open their veins by the same blow.

      Advanced age and his extremely meagre diet had left little blood in Seneca’s veins, and it flowed with painful slowness. His tortures were excessive and, to avoid the intolerable grief of being witnesses of each other’s suffering, they shut themselves up in separate apartments. With that marvellous intrepid tranquillity which characterised some of the old sages, Seneca calmly dictated his last thoughts to his surrounding friends. These were afterwards published. His agonies being still prolonged, he took hemlock; and this also failing, he was carried into a vapour-stove, where he was suffocated, and thus at length ceased to suffer.

      In estimating the character of Seneca, it is just that we should consider all the circumstances of the exceptional time in which his life was cast. Perhaps there has never been an age or people more utterly corrupt and abandoned than that of the period of the earlier Roman Cæsars and that of Rome and the large cities of the empire. Allowing the utmost that his detractors have brought against him, the moral character of the author of the Consolations and Letters stands out in bright relief as compared with that of the immense majority of his contemporaries of equal rank and position, who were sunk in the depths of licentiousness and of selfish indifference to the miseries of the surrounding world. That his public career was not of so exalted a character altogether as are his moral precepts, is only too patent to be denied and, in this shortcoming of a loftier ideal, he must share reproach with some of the most esteemed of the world’s luminaries. If, for instance, we compare him with Cicero or with Francis Bacon, the comparison would certainly be not unfavourable to Seneca. The darkest stigma on the reputation of the great Latin moralist is his connivance at the death of the infamous Agrippina, the mother of his pupil Nero. Although not to be excused, we may fairly attribute this act to conscientious, if mistaken, motives. His best apology is to be found in the fact that, so long as he assisted to direct the counsels of Nero, he contrived to restrain that prince’s depraved disposition from those outbreaks which, after the death of the philosopher, have stigmatised the name of Nero with undying infamy.

      The principal writings of Seneca are:—

      1. On Anger. His earliest, and perhaps his best known, work.

      2. On Consolation. Addressed to his mother, Helvia. An admirable philosophical exhortation.

      3. On Providence; or, Why evils happen to good men though a divine Providence may exist.

      4. On Tranquillity of Mind.

      5. On Clemency. Addressed to Nero Cæsar. One of the most meritorious writings of all antiquity. It is not unworthy of being classed with the humanitarian protests of Beccaria and Voltaire. The stoical distinction between clemency and pity (misericordia), in book ii., is, as Seneca admits, merely a dispute about words.

      6. On the Shortness of Life. In which the proper employment of time and the acquisition of wisdom are eloquently enforced as the best employment of a fleeting life.

      7. On a Happy Life. In which he inculcates that there is no happiness without virtue. An excellent treatise.

      8. On Kindnesses.

      9. Epistles to Lucilius. 124 in number. They abound in lessons and precepts in morality and philosophy, and, excepting the De Irâ, have been the most read, perhaps, of all Seneca’s productions.

      10. Questions on Natural History. In seven books.

      Besides these moral and philosophic works, he composed several tragedies. They were not intended for the stage, but rather as moral lessons. As in all his works, there is much of earnest thought and feeling, although expressed in rhetorical and declamatory language.

      What especially characterises Seneca’s writings is their remarkably humanitarian spirit. Altogether he is imbued with this, for the most part, very modern feeling in a greater degree than any other writer, Greek or Latin. Plutarch indeed, in his noble Essay on Flesh Eating, is more expressly denunciatory of the barbarism of the Slaughter House, and of the horrible cruelties inseparably connected with it, and evidently felt more deeply the importance of exposing its evils. The Latin moralist, however, deals with a wider range of ethical questions, and on such subjects, as, e.g., the relations of master and slave, is far ahead of his contemporaries. His treatment of Dietetics, in common with that of most of the old-world moralists, is rather from the spiritual and ascetic than from the purely humanitarian point of view. “The judgments on Seneca’s writings,” says the author of the article on Seneca in Dr. Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Latin Biography, “have been as various as the opinions about his character, and both in extremes. It has been said of him that he looks best in quotations; but this is an admission that there is something worth quoting, which cannot be said of all writers. That Seneca possessed great mental powers cannot be doubted. He had seen much of human life, and he knew well what man is. His philosophy, so far as he adopted a system, was the stoical; but it was rather an eclecticism of stoicism than pure stoicism. His style is antithetical, and apparently laboured; and where there is much labour there is generally affectation. Yet his language is clear and forcible—it is not mere words—there is thought always. It would not be easy to name any modern writer, who has treated on morality and has said so much that is practically good and true, or has treated the matter in so attractive a way.”

      Jerome, in his Ecclesiastical Writers, hesitates to include him in the catalogue of his saints only because he is not certain of the genuineness of the alleged literary correspondence between Seneca and St. Paul. We may observe, in passing, on the remarkable coincidence of the presence of the two greatest teachers of the old and the new faiths in the capital of the Roman Empire at the same time; and it is possible, or rather highly probable, that St. Paul was acquainted with the writings of Seneca; while, from the total silence of the pagan philosopher, it seems that he knew nothing of the Pauline epistles or teaching. Amongst many testimonies to the superiority of Seneca, Tacitus, the great historian of the empire, speaks of the “splendour and celebrity of his philosophic writings,” as well as of his “amiable genius”—ingenium amœnum. (Annals, xii., xiii.) The elder Pliny writes of him as “at the very head of all the learned men of that time.” (xiv. 4.) Petrarch quotes the testimony of Plutarch, “that great man who, Greek though he was freely confesses ‘that there is no Greek writer who could be brought into comparison with him in the department of morals.’ ”

      The following passage is to be found in a letter to Lucilius, in which, after expatiating on the sublimity of the teaching of the philosopher Attalus in inculcating moderation and self-control in corporeal

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