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medical men, nor of so many surgical instruments or of so many boxes of drugs. Health was simple for a simple reason. Many dishes have induced many diseases. Note how vast a quantity of lives one stomach absorbs—devastator of land and sea.[29] No wonder that with so discordant diet disease is ever varying. … Count the cooks: you will no longer wonder at the innumerable number of human maladies.”—(Ep. xcv.)

      We must be content with giving our readers only one more of Seneca’s exhortations to a reform in diet:—

      “You think it a great matter that you can bring yourself to live without all the apparatus of fashionable dishes; that you do not desire wild boars of a thousand pounds weight or the tongues of rare birds, and other portents of a luxury which now despises whole carcases,[30] and chooses only certain parts of each victim. I shall admire you then only when you scorn not plain bread, when you have persuaded yourself that herbs exist not for other animals only, but for man also—if you shall recognise that vegetables are sufficient food for the stomach into which we now stuff valuable lives, as though it were to keep them for ever. For what matters it what it receives, since it will soon lose all that it has devoured? The apparatus of dishes, containing the spoils of sea and land, gives you pleasure, you say. … The splendour of all this, heightened by art, gives you pleasure. Ah! those very things so solicitously sought for and served up so variously—no sooner have they entered the belly than one and the same foulness shall take possession of them all. Would you contemn the pleasures of the table? Consider their final destination” (exitum specta).[31]

      If Seneca makes dietetics of the first importance, he at the same time by no means neglects the other departments of ethics, which, for the most part, ultimately depend upon that fundamental reformation; and he is equally excellent on them all. Space will not allow us to present our readers with all the admirable dicta of this great moralist. We cannot resist, however, the temptation to quote some of his unique teaching on certain branches of humanitarianism and philosophy little regarded either in his own time or in later ages. Slaves, both in pagan and Christian Europe, were regarded very much as the domesticated non-human species are at the present day, as born merely for the will and pleasure of their masters. Such seems to have been the universal estimate of their status. While often superior to their lords, nationally and individually, by birth, by mind, and by education, they were at the arbitrary disposal of too often cruel and capricious owners:—

      

      “Are they slaves?” eloquently demands Seneca. “Nay, they are men. Are they slaves? Nay, they live under the same roof (contubernales). Are they slaves? Nay, they are humble friends. Are they slaves? Nay, they are fellow-servants (conservi), if you will consider that both master and servant are equally the creatures of chance. I smile, then, at the prevalent opinion which thinks it a disgrace for one to sit down to a meal with his servant. Why is it thought a disgrace, but because arrogant Custom allows a master a crowd of servants to stand round him while he is feasting?”

      He expressly denounces their cruel and contemptuous treatment, and demands in noble language (afterwards used by Epictetus, himself a slave):—

      “Would you suppose that he whom you call a slave has the same origin and birth as yourself? has the same free air of heaven with yourself? that he breathes, lives, and dies like yourself?”

      He denounces the haughty and insulting attitude of masters towards their helpless dependants, and lays down the precept: “So live with your dependant as you would wish your superior to live with you.” He laments the use of the term “slaves,” or “servants” (servi), in place of the old “domestics” (familiares). He declaims against the common prejudice which judges by the outward appearance:—

      “That man,” he asserts, “is of the stupidest sort who values another either by his dress or by his condition.” Is he a slave? He is, it may be, free in mind. He is the true slave who is a slave to cruelty, to ambition, to avarice, to pleasure. “Love,” he declares, insisting upon humanity, “cannot co-exist with fear.”—(Ep. xlviii.)

      He is equally clear upon the ferocity and barbarity of the gladiatorial and other shows of the Circus, which were looked upon by his contemporaries as not only interesting spectacles, but as a useful school for war and endurance—much for the same reason as that on which the “sports” of the present day are defended. Cicero uses this argument, and only expresses the general sentiment. Not so Seneca. He speaks of a chance visit to the Circus (the gigantic Colosseum was not yet built), for the sake of mental relaxation, expecting to see, at the period of the day he had chosen, only innocent exercises. He indignantly narrates the horrid and bloody scenes of suffering, and demands, with only too much reason, whether it is not evident that such evil examples receive their righteous retribution in the deterioration of character of those who encourage them:—

      “Ah! what dense mists of darkness do power and prosperity cast over the human mind. He [the magistrate] believes himself to be raised above the common lot of mortality, and to be at the pinnacle of glory, when he has offered so many crowds of wretched human beings to the assaults of wild beasts; when he forces animals of the most different species to engage in conflict; when in the full presence of the Roman populace he causes torrents of blood to flow, a fitting school for the future scenes of still greater bloodshed.”[32]

      In his treatise On Clemency, dedicated to his youthful pupil Nero, he anticipates the very modern theory—theory, for the prevalent practice is a very different thing—that prevention is better than punishment, and he denounces the cruel and selfish policy of princes and magistrates, who are, for the most part, concerned only to punish the criminals produced by unjust and unequal laws:—

      “Will not that man,” he asks, “appear to be a very bad father who punishes his children, even for the slightest causes, with constant blows? Which preceptor is the worthier to teach—the one who scarifies his pupils’ backs if their memory happens to fail them, or if their eyes make a slight blunder in reading, or he who chooses rather to correct and instruct by admonition and the influence of shame? … You will find that those crimes are most often committed which are most often punished. … Many capital punishments are no less disgraceful to a ruler than are many deaths to a physician. Men are more easily governed by mild laws. The human mind is naturally stubborn and inclined to be perverse, and it more readily follows than is forced. The disposition to cruelty which takes delight in blood and wounds is the characteristic of wild beasts; it is to throw away the human character and to pass into that of a denizen of the woods.”

      Speaking of giving assistance to the needy, he says that the genuine philanthropist will give his money—

      “Not in that insulting way in which the great majority of those who wish to seem merciful disdain and despise those whom they help, and shrink from contact with them, but as one mortal to a fellow-mortal he will give as though out of a treasury that should be common to all.”[33]

      Next to the De Clementiâ and the De Irâ (“On Anger”), his treatise On the Happy Life is most admirable. In the abundance of what is unusually good and useful it is difficult to choose. His warning (so unheeded) against implicit confidence in authority and tradition cannot be too often repeated:—

      “There is nothing against which we ought to be more on our guard than, like a flock of sheep, following the crowd of those who have preceded us—going, as we do, not where we ought to go, but where men have walked before. And yet there is nothing which involves us in greater evils than following and settling our faith upon authority—considering those dogmas or practices best which have been received heretofore with the greatest applause, and which have a multitude of great names. We live not according to reason, but according to mere fashion and tradition, from whence that enormous heap of bodies, which fall one over the other. It happens as in a great slaughter of men, when the crowd presses upon itself. Not one falls without dragging with him another. The first to fall are the cause of destruction to the succeeding ranks. It runs through the whole of human life. No-one’s error is limited to himself alone, but he is the author and cause of another’s error. … We shall recover our sound health if only we shall separate ourselves from

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