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SEEKERS AETER GOD

BY THE

REV. F. W. FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S.,

CANON OF WESTMINSTER.

MACMILLAN AND CO.

I5«I,

TO MY ESTEEMED COLLEAGUE

GUSTAVE MASSON, Esq. B.A. Univ. Gall.

WHO HAS OFTEN ASSISTED ME

NOT ONLY WITH HIS LEARNING AND MANY ACCOMPLISHMENTS,
BUT ALSO WITH THE RARER AND BETTER AID
OF KINDLY SYMPATHY AND FAITHFUL FRIENDSHIP,

I CORDIALLY AND AFFECTIONATELY

^zVunk

THE FOLLOWING PAGES.

^

PREFACE.

I HAVE endeavoured in the following pages to give
in a popular manner as full an account of the lives
and opinions of three great heathen philosophers as
was possible in the space at my command. In the
title of the book they are called " Seekers after God,"
and surely they deserve that title if it may be given
to men who, amid infinite difficulties and surrounded
by a corrupt society, devoted themselves to the
earnest search after those truths which might best
make their lives ** beautiful before God."

The Divine declaration that '' every one that askcth
receivetJi ; and he that seeketh^ findetJi ; and to him that
knocketh it shall be ope?ied," does not apply to Chris-
tians only. It would indeed be a bitter and bigoted
view of the world's history which should refuse to
acknowledge the noble standard of morality and
practice to which the invisible workings of God's
Holy Spirit enabled many of the heathen to attain.
We know that there were those amon^ them wliose
virtue and charity, in spite of their dim and imperfect

viii PREFACE.

knowledge, might put many a Christian to the blush ;
we may believe with unfeigned gratitude that in
" seeking after the Lord, if haply they might feel
after Him and find Him," they learned to recognise
that deep and ennobling truth to which some of their
own poets had given expression, that " He is not
far from every one of us, for in Him we live, and
move, and have our being."

Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius are not only the
most clear-sighted moralists among ancient philoso-
phers, but are also, with the single exception ot
Socrates, the best and holiest characters presented
to us in the records of antiquity. In many respects
Seneca is wholly unworthy to be placed by their
side, nor have I attempted to gloss over his terrible
inconsistencies. Yet in spite of all his failures, he
was a good man, and we must apply to those who
speak of him without consideration or generosity,
the censure of Gothe : —

" Und steh' beschamt wenn Du bekennen musst
Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunkeln Drange
1st sick des rechtcs We^es wokl bewusst^

Had more space been at my command, that further
examination of his widtings which formed part of my
original plan would perhaps have placed him higher
in the reader's estimation ; but I have entered into
the details of his life because I had the ulterior object
of showing what was at that time the moral and

PREFACE. ix

political condition of the Roman world, and in what
atmosphere the influences of Christianity were forced
to work. The two subsequent biographies will show
us how in every estate of life the grace of God was
sufficient to enable men to struggle successfully with
immense temptations, — sufficient to make any man
pure and holy who aimed at being so, — sufficient to
give humility, and patience, and tenderness to an
irresponsible Roman Emperor, and freedom, and con-
tentment, and imperial magnanimity to a persecuted
Phrygian slave.

People sometimes talk and write as though Pagan
truth were one thing and Christian truth another ;
but Truth comes only from Him who is the Truth,
and neither Jewish prophet nor heathen philosopher
can attain to it, or act up to it, save by His aid.
The reader must ill have understood these pages if
he sees in them any glorification of Stoicism as com-
pared with Christianity, or of natural as opposed to
revealed religion. Surely even the most ignorant
might deduce from them the lesson that in every
Sunday-school —

" Each little voice in turn

Some glorious truth proclaims,
What sages would have died to learn

Now taught by cottage dames. "

A Seneca, a Musonius Rufus, an Epictctus, a
Marcus Aurelius might have been taught by the hum-
blest Christian child about a Comfort, an Example,

X PREFACE.

a Hope, which were capable of gilding their lives
with unknown brightness and happiness, — capable of
soothing the anguish of every sorrow, of breaking
the violence of every temptation, of lightening the
burden of every care. And yet with all our know-
ledge and enlightenment we fall far short of some
of them ; we are less stem with our own faults, less
watchful, less self-denying, less tender to one another.
With our superior gifts, with our surer hopes, with
our more present means of grace, what manner of
men ought we to be .'' We ought to have attained to
far loftier moral altitudes than they, but we have not.
Let us admit with shame and sorrow that some
among these heathens showed themselves to be
nobler, loftier, holier, freer from vanity, freer from
meanness, freer from special pleading, freer from false-
hood, more spiritual, more reasonable, on some points
even more enlightened, than many among ourselves.
The very ideal of the Christian life seems to have
been dwarfed to a poor, and vulgar, and conventional
standard. Perhaps the contemplation of virtue, and
zeal, and integrity, and consistency, even in heathen
lives, may produce at least some infinitesimal effect
in arousing some of us to a desire for "something
more high and heroical in religion than the present
age affecteth." If so, these pages will not have been
written quite in vain.

F. W. F.

CONTENTS.

SENECA.

PAGB
INTROUCTORY X

CHAPTER I.

THE FAMILY AND EARLY YEARS OF SENECA 7

CHAPTER n.

THE EDUCATION OF SENECA. 23

CHAPTER HI.

THE STATE OF ROMAN SOCIETY 36

CHAPTER IV.

POLITICAL CONDITION OF ROME UNDER TIBERIUS AND CAIUS. 54

CHAPTER V.

THE REIGN OF CAIUS S6

CHAPTER VI.

THE REIGN OF CLAUDIUS, AND THE BANISHMENT OF SENECA. 74

xii CONTENTS.

CHAPTER VII.

PAGE

SENECA IN EXILE 87

CHAPTER VIII.

SENECA'S PHILOSOPHY GIVES WAY .,.,.. lOO

CHAPTER IX.
senega's recall from exile . , 106

CHAPTER X.

AGRIPPINA, THE MOTHER OF NERO Ill

CHAPTER XI.

NERO AND HJS TUTOR l2I

CHAPTER XII.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END 142

CHAPTER XIII.

THE DEATH OF SENECA . . . i 'S^

CHAPTER XIV.

SENECA AND ST. PAUL , 167

CHAPTER XV.

SENECA'S RESEMBLANCES TO SCRIPTURE ,,,.,... 174

CONTENTS. xiii

EPICTETUS.
CHAPTER I.

PAGE

THE LIFE OF EPICTETUS, AND HOW HE REGARDED IT . . . 1 86

CHAPTER II.
LIFE AND VIEWS OF EPICTETUS {continued) 203

CHAPTER III.

LIFE AND VIEWS OF EPICTETUS {continued) 211

CHAPTER IV.

THE "manual" and "FRAGMENTS" OF EPICTETUS. . . . 221

CHAPTER V.

THE DISCOURSES OF EPICTETUS „ . 228

MARCUS AURELIUS.
CHAPTER I.

THE EDUCATION OF AN EMFEROR 257

CHAPTER II.

THE LIFE AND THOUGHTS OF MARCUS AURELIUS 27 1

CHAPTER III.

THE LIFE AND THOUGHTS OF MARCUS AURELIUS {continued) . 284

CHAPTER IV.

THE " MEDITATIONS " OF MARCUS AURELIUS ...... 303

CONCLUSION ;,,S

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGB
AURELIUS AND HIS MOTHER (p. 273). By ARTHUR HUGHES.

Frontispiece.

ILLUMINATED TITLE; WITH VIGNETTE OF MARCUS AURELIUS
FROM A BUST IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM.

LUCIUS ANNiEUS SENECA To face 1^2.

ANTONINUS PIUS, FROM A BUST IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM

To/ace 271

SEEKERS AFTER GOD.

SENECA.

** Ce nuage frange de rayons qui touche presqu' a I'immortelle aurore
des verites chreriennes." — -Pontmartin.

INTRODUCTORY.

On the banks of the Baetis — the modern Guadal-
quiver, — and under the woods that crown the south-
ern slopes of the Sierra Morena, lies the beautiful
and famous city of Cordova. It had been selected
by Marcellus as the site of a Roman colony ; and
so many Romans and Spaniards of high rank chose
it for their residence, that it obtained from Augustus
the honourable surname of the *' Patrician Colony."
Spain during this period of the Empire exercised no
small influence upon the literature and politics of
Rome. No less than three great Emperors — Tra-
jan, Hadrian, and Tlieodosius, — were natives of
Spain. Columella, the writer on agriculture, was
born at Cadiz ; Quintilian, the great writer on the
education of an orator, was born at Calahorra ; the
poet Martial was a native of Bilbilis ; but Cordova

I

2 SENECA.

could boast the yet higher honour of having given
birth to the Senecas, an honour which won for it
the epithet of ** The Eloquent." A ruin is shown
to modern travellers which is popularly called the
House of Seneca, and the fact is at least a proof
that the city still retains some memory of its illus-
trious sons.

Marcus Anngeus Seneca, the father of the philo-
sopher, was by rank a Roman knight. What causes
had led him or his family to settle in Spain we do
not know, and the names Anneeus and Seneca are
alike obscure. It has been vaguely conjectured that
both names may involve an allusion to the longevity
of some of the founders of the family, for Annasus
seems to be connected with annus, a year, and Sen-
eca with senex, an old man. The common English
composite plant ragwort is called senecio from the
white and feathery pappus or appendage of its seeds ;
and similarly, Isidore says that the first Seneca was
so named because " he was born with white hair."

Although the father of Seneca was of knightly
rank, his family had never risen to any eminence ; it
belonged to the class of noiiveaux riches, and we do
not know whether it was of Roman or of Spanish
descent. But his mother Helvia — an uncommon
name, which, by a curious coincidence, belonged
also to the mother of Cicero — was a Spanish lady ;
and it was from her that Seneca, as well as his
famous nephew, the poet Lucan, doubtless derived
many of the traits which mark their intellect and their
character. There was in the Spaniard a richness and

INTRODUCTORY.

splendour of imagination, an intensity and warmth,
a touch of "phantasy and flame," which we find in
these two men of genius, and which was wholly
wanting to the Roman temperament.

Of Cordova itself, except in a single epigram,
Seneca makes no mention ; but this epigram suffices
to she v\ that he must have been familiar with its
stirring and memorable traditions. The elder Seneca
must have been living at Cordova during all the
troublous years of civil war, when his native city
caused equal offence to Pompey and to Caesar.
Doubtless, too, he would have had stories to tellof th'i
noble Sertorius, and of the tame fawn which gained
for him the credit of divine assistance ; and contem-
porary reminiscences of that day of desperate disaster
when Caesar, indignant that Cordova should have
embraced the cause of the sons of Pompey, avenged
himself by a massacre of 22,000 of the citizens. From
his mother Helvia, Seneca must often have heard
about the fierce and gallant struggle in which her
country had resisted the iron yoke of Rome. Many a
time as a boy must he have been told how long and
how heroically Saguntum had withstood the assaults
and baffled the triumph of Hannibal ; how bravely
Viriathus had fought, and how shamefully he fell ;
and how at length the unequal contest, which reduced
Spain to the condition of a province, was closed, when
the heroic defenders of Numantia, rather than yield
to Scipio, reduced their city to a heap of blood-
stained ruins.

But, whatever may have been the extent to which
2

4 SENECA.

Seneca was influenced by the Spanish blood which
flowed in his veins, and the Spanish legends on which
his youth was fed, it was not in Spain that his lot
was cast. When he was yet an infant in arms his
father, with all his family, migrated from Cordova to
Rome. What may have been the special reason for
this important step we do not know ; possibly, like
the father of Horace, the elder Seneca may have
sought a better education for his sons than could be
provided by even so celebrated a provincial, town as
Cordova ; possibly — for he belonged to a somewhat
pushing family — he may have desired to gain fresh
wealth and honour in the imperial city.

Thither we must follow him ; and, as it is our object
not only to depict a character but also to sketch the
characteristics of a very memorable age in the world's
history, we must try to get a glimpse of the family
in the midst of which our young philosopher grew
up, of the kind of education which he received, and
of the influences which were likely to tell upon him
during his childish and youthful years. Only by such
means shall we be able to judge of him aright.
And it is worth while to try and gain a right con-
ception of the man, not only because he was very
eminent as a poet, an author, and a politician, not
only because he fills a very prominent place in the
pages of the great historian, who has drawn so
immortal a picture of Rome under the Emperors ;
not only because in him we can best study the in-
evitable signs which mark, even in the works of men
of genius, a degraded people and a decaying litera-

INTRODUCTORY. 5

ture ; but because he was, as the title of this vokime
designates him, a " SEEKER AFTER GoD." Whatever
may have been the dark and questionable actions of
his life — and in this narrative we shall endeavour to
furnish a plain and unvarnished picture of the manner
in which he lived,— rit is certain that, as a philosopher
and as a moralist, he furnishes us with the grandest
and most eloquent series of truths to which, unillumi-
nated by Christianity, the thoughts of man have
ever attained. The purest and most exalted philo-
sophic sect of antiquity was " the sect of the Stoics ; "
and Stoicism never found a literary exponent more
ardent, more eloquent, or more enlightened than
Lucius Annaeus Seneca. So nearly, in fact, does he
seem to have arrived at the truths of Christianity,
that to many it seemed a matter for marvel that he
could have known them without having heard them
from inspired lips. He is constantly cited with appro-
bation by some of the most eminent Christian fathers.
Tertullian, Lactantius, even St. Augustine hiTr»self,
quote his words with marked admiration, and St.
Jerome appeals to him as ** our Seneca." The
Council of Trent go further still, and quote him as
though he were an acknowledged Father of the
Church. For many centuries there were some who
accepted as genuine the spurious letters supposed to
have been interchanged between Seneca and St.
Paul, in which Seneca is made to express a wish to
hold among the Pagans the same beneficial position
which St. Paul held in the Christian world. I'he
possibility of such an intercourse, the nature and

6 SENECA,

extent of such supposed obligations, will come under
our consideration hereafter. All that I here desire to
say is, that in considering the life of Seneca we are
not only dealing with a life which was rich in
memorable incidents, and which was cast into an age
upon which Christianity dawned as a new light in the
darkness, but also the life of one who climbed the
loftiest peaks of the moral philosophy of Paganism,
and who in many respects may be regarded as the
Coryphaeus of what has been sometimes called a
Natural Religion.

It is not my purpose to turn aside from the
narrative in order to indulge in moral reflections,
because such reflections will come with tenfold force
if they are naturally suggested to the reader's mind
by the circumstances of the biography. But from
first to last it will be abundantly obvious to every
thoughtful mind that alike the morality and the
philosophy of Paganism, as contrasted with the
splendour of revealed truth and the holiness of
Christian life, are but as moonlight is to sunlight.
The Stoical philosophy may be compared to a
torch which flings a faint gleam here and there
in the dusky recesses of a mighty cavern ; Chris-
tianity to the sun pouring into the inmost depths
of the same cavern its sevenfold illumination. The
torch had a value and brightness of its own, but
compared with the dawning of that new glory it
appears to be dim and ineffectual, even though its
brightness was a real brightness, and had been drawn
from the same ethereal source.

CHAPTER I.

THE FAMILY AND EARLY YEARS OF SENECA.

The exact date of Seneca's birth is uncertain, but
it took place in all probability about seven years
before the commencement of the Christian era. It
will give to his life a touch of deep and solemn
interest if we remember that, during all those guilty
and stormy scenes amid which his earlier destiny
was cast, there lived and taught in Palestine the
Son of God, the Saviour of the world.

The problems which for many years tormented his
mind were beginning to find their solution, amid far
other scenes, by men whose creed and condition he
despised. While Seneca was being guarded by his
attendant slave through the crowded and dangerous
streets of Rome on his way to school, St. Peter and
St. John were fisher-lads by the shores of Genne-
sareth ; while Seneca was ardently assimilating the
doctrine of the stoic Attalus, St. Paul, with no less
fervency of soul, sat learning at the feet of Gamaliel ;
and long before Seneca had made his way, through
paths dizzy and dubious, to the zenith of his fame,
unknown to him that Saviour had been crucified

8 SENECA.

through whose only merits he and we can ever attain
to our final rest.

Seneca was about two years old when he was
carried to Rome in his nurse's arms. Like many
other men who have succeeded in attaining eminence,
he suffered much from ill health in his early years.
He tells us of one serious illness from which he
slowly recovered under the affectionate and tender
nursing of his mother's sister. All his life long he
was subject to attacks of asthma, which, after suffering
every form of disease, he says that he considers to
be the worst At one time his personal sufferings
weighed so heavily on his spirits that nothing save a
regard for his father's wishes prevented him from
suicide ; and later in life he was only withheld from
seeking the deliverance of death by the tender affection
of his wife Paulina. He might have used with little
alteration the words of Pope, that his various studies
but served to help him

" Through this long disease, my life.''*

The recovery from this tedious illness is the only
allusion which Seneca has made to the circumstances
of his childhood. The ancient writers, even the
ancient poets, but rarely refer, even in the most cur-
sory manner, to their early years. The cause of this
reticence offers a curious problem for our inquiry, but
the fact is indisputable. Whereas there is scarcely a
single modern poet who has not lingered with undis-
guised feelings of happiness over the gentle memo-
ries of his chilclhood, not one of the ancient poets

HIS FAMILY AND EARLY YEARS. 9

has systematically touched upon the theme at all.
From Lydgate down to Tennyson, it would be easy
to quote from our English poets a continuous line of
lyric songs on the subject of boyish years. How to
the young child the fir-trees seemed to touch the sky,
how his heart leaped up at the i?lght of the rainbow,
how he sat at his mother's feet and pricked into
paper the tissued flowers of her dress, how he chased
the bright butterfly, or in his tenderness feared to
brush even the dust from off its wings, how he learnt
sweet lessons and said innocent prayers at his father's
knee : trifles like these, yet trifles which have been
rendered noble and beautiful by a loving imagination,
have been narrated over and over again in the songs
of our poets. The lovely lines of Heniy Vaughau
might be taken as a type of thousands more : —

" Happy those early days, when I-
Shined in my Angel infancy.
Before I undei^tood diij place
Appciptcd for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy aught
But a white celestial thought ;

» * -n-

Before T taught my tongue to wound
My conscience with a sinful sound ;
Or had the black art to dispense
A several sin to every sense ;
But felt through all this fleshly dress,
Bright shoots of everlastingness."

The memory of every student of English poetry
will furnish countless parallels to thoughts like these.
How is it that no similar poem could be quoted from
the whole range of ancient literature } How is it

lo SENECA.

that to the Greek and Roman poets that morning of
Hfe, which should have been so filled with '' natural
blessedness," seems to have been a blank ? How is it
that writers so voluminous, so domestic, so afifectionate
as Cicero, Virgil, and Horace, do not make so much
as a single allusioif to the existence of their own
mothers ?

To answer this question fully would be to write an
entire essay on the difference between ancient and
modern life, and would carry me far away from my
immediate subject* But I may say generally, that
the explanation rests in the fact that in all probability
childhood among the ancients was a disregarded, and
in most cases a far less happy, period than it is with
us. The birth of a child in the house of a Greek or
a Roman was not necessarily a subject for rejoicing.
If the father, when the child was first shown to him,
stooped down and took it in his arms, it was received
as a member of the family ; if he left it unnoticed,
then it was doomed to death, and was exposed in
some lonely or barren place to the mercy of the wild
beasts, or of the first passer-by. And even if a child
escaped this fate, yet for the first seven or eight years
of life he was kept in the gynaeceum, or women's
apartments, and rarely or never saw his father's face.
No halo of romance or poetry was shed over those
early years. Until the child was full grown the abso-
lute power of life or death rested in his father's

* See, however, the same question treated from a somewhat different
point of view by M. Nisard, in his charming Etudes sur les Pontes de la
Decadence^ ii. 17, sqq.

HIS FAMIL V AND EARLY YEARS. ii

hands ; he had no freedom, and met with little notice.
For individual life the ancients had a very slight
regard ; there was nothing autobiographic or intro-
spective in their temperament. With them public
life, the life of the State, was everything; domestic
life, the life of the individual? occupied but a small
share of their consideration. All the innocent pleasures
of infancy, the joys of the hearth, the charm of the
domestic circle, the flow and sparkle of childish
gaiety, were by them but little appreciated. The
years before manhood were years of prospect, and in
most cases they offered but little to make them
worth the retrospect. It is a mark of the more
modern character which stamps the writings of
Seneca, as compared with earlier authors, that he
addresses his mother in terms of the deepest affec-
tion, and cannot speak of his darling little son except
in a voice that seems to break with tears.

Let us add another curious consideration. The
growth of the personal character, the reminiscences
of a life advancing into perfect consciousness, are
largely moulded by the gradual recognition of moral
laws, by the sense of mystery evolved in the inevi-
table struggle between duty and pleasure, — between
the desire to do right and the temptation to do
wrong. But among the ancients the conception of
morality was so wholly different from ours, their
notions of moral obligation were, in the immense
majority of cases, so much less stringent and so
much less important, they had so faint a disapproval
for sins which we condemn, and so weak an indigna-

12 SENECA.

tion against vices which we abhor, that in their
early years wc can hardly suppose them to have
often fathomed those " abysmal deeps of personality,"
the recognition of which is a necessary element of
marked individual growth.

We have, therefore, no materials for forming any
vivid picture of Seneca's childhood ; but, from what
we gather about the circumstances and the character
of his family, we should suppose that he was ex-
ceptionally fortunate. The Senecas were wealthy ;
they held a good position in society ; they were a
family of cultivated taste*, of literary pursuits, of high
character, and of amiable dispositions. Their wealth
raised them above the necessity of those mean cares
and degrading shifts to eke out a scanty livelihood
which mark the career of other literary men who
were their contemporaries. Their rank and culture
secured them the intimacy of all who were best worth
knowing in Roman circles ; and the general dignity
and morality which marked their lives would free
them from all likelihood of being thrown into close
intercourse with that numerous class of luxurious
epicureans, whose unblushing and unbounded vice
gave an infamous notoriety to the capital of the
world.

Of Marcus Annaeus Seneca, the father of our
philosopher, we know few personal particulars, except
that he was a professional rhetorician, who drew up
for the use of his sons and pupils a number of
oratorical exercises, which have come down to us
under the names of StiasoricE and Controversies.

HIS FAMILY AND EARLY YEARS. 13

They are a series of declamatory arguments on both
sides, respecting a number of historical or purely
imaginary subjects ; and it would be impossible to
conceive any reading more utterly unprofitable. But
the elder Seneca was steeped to the lips in an
artificial rhetoric ; and these highly elaborated argu-
ments, invented in order to sharpen the faculties for
purposes of declamation and debate, were probably
due partly to his note-book and partly to his memory.
His memory was so prodigious that after hearing two
thousand words he could repeat them again in the
same order. Few of those who have possessed such
extraordinary powers of memory have been men of
first-rate talent, and the elder Seneca was no ex-
ception. But if his memory did not improve his
original genius, it must at any rate have made him a
very agreeable member of society, and have furnished
him with an abundant store of personal and political
anecdotes. In short, Marcus Seneca was a well-to-do,
intelligent man of the world, with plenty of common
sense, with a turn for public speaking, with a profound
dislike and contempt for anything which he con-
sidered philosophical or fantastic, and with a keen
eye to the main advantage.

His wife Helvia, if we may trust the panegyric of
her son, was on the other hand a far less common-
place character. But for her husband's dislike to
learning and philosophy she would have become a
proficient in both, and in a short period of study she
had made a considerable advance. Yet her intellect
was less remarkable than the nobility and sweetness

r4 SENECA.

of her mind ; other mothers loved their sons because
their own ambition was gratified by their honours,
and their feminine wants supplied by their riches ; but
Helvia loved her sons for their own sakes, treated
them with liberal generosity, but refused to reap any
personal benefit from their wealth, managed their
patrimonies with disinterested zeal, and spent her
own money to bear the expenses of their political
career. She rose superior to the foibles and vices of
her time. Immodesty, the plague-spot of her age,
had never infected her pure life. Gems and pearls
had little charm for her. She was never ashamed of
her children, as though their presence betrayed her
own advancing age. " You never stained your face,"
says her son, when writing to console her in his exile,
*' with walnut-juice or rouge ; you never delighted in
dresses indelicately low ; your single ornament was a
loveliness which no age could destroy ; your special
glory was a conspicuous chastity." We may well say
with Mr. Tennyson —

" Happy he
With such a mother ! faith in womankind
Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high
Comes easy to him, and, though he trip and fall.
He shall not blind his soul with clay."

Nor was his mother Helvia the only high-minded
lady in whose society the boyhood of Seneca was
spent. Her sister, whose name is unknown, that aunt
who had so tenderly protected the delicate boy, and
nursed him through the sickness of his infancy, seems

HIS FAMILY AND EARLY YEARS, 15

to have inspired him with an affection of unusual
warmth. He tells us how, when her husband was
Prefect of Egypt, so far was she from acting as was
usual with the wives of provincial governors, that she
was as much respected and beloved as they were for
the most part execrated and shunned. So serious
w^as the evil caused by these ladies, so intolerable was
their cruel rapacity, that it had been seriously debated
in the Senate whether they should ever be allowed
to accompany their husbands. Not so with Helvia's
sister. She was never seen in public ; she allowed no
provincial to visit her house ; she begged no favour
for herself, and suffered none to be begged from her.
The province not only praised her, but, what was still
more to her credit, barely knew anything about her, and
longed in vain for another lady who should imitate her
virtue and self-control. Egypt was the head-quarters
of biting and loquacious calumny, yet even Egypt
never breathed a word against the sanctity of her life.
And when during their homeward voyage her husband
died, in spite of danger and tempest and the deeply-
rooted superstition which considered it perilous to sail
with a corpse on board, not even the imminent peril
of shipwreck could drive her to separate herself from
her husband's body until she had provided for its safe
and honourable sepulture. These are the traits of a
good and heroic woman ; and that she reciprocated
the regard which makes her nephew so emphatic in
her praise may be conjectured from the fact that, when
he made his d^but as a candidate for the honours of
the State, she emerged from her habitual seclusion,

i6 SENECA,

laid aside for a time her matronly reserve, and, in ordei
to assist him in his canvass, faced for his sake the
rustic impertinence and ambitious turbulence of the
crowds who thronged the Forum and streets of Rome.

Two brothers, very different from each other in
their habits and character, completed the family
circle, Marcus Annoeus Novatus and Lucius Anna^us
Mela, of whom the former was older, the latter
younger, than their more famous brother.

Marcus Annaeus Novatus is known to history
under the name of Junius Gallio, which he took
v/hen adopted by the orator of that name, who was
a friend of his father. He is none other than the
Gallio of the Acts, the Proconsul of Achaia, whose
name has passed current among Christians as a pro-
verb of complacent indifference.*

The scene, however, in which Scripture gives us a
glimpse of him has been much misunderstood, and to
talk of him as " careless Gallio," or to apply the ex-
pression that " he cared for none of these things "
to indifference in religious matters, is entirely to
misapply the spirit of the narrative. What really
happened was this. The Jews, indignant at the suc-
cess of Paul's preaching, dragged him before the
tribunal of Gallio, and accused him of introducing
illegal modes of worship When the Apostle was
about to defend himself, Gallio contemptuously cut
him short by saying to the Jews, " If in truth there
were in question any act of injustice or wicked mis-
conduct, I should naturally have tolerated your coni-

* Acts XXV. 19.

HIS FAMILY ^ND EARLY YEARS. i7

plaint. But if this is some verbal inquiry about
mere technical matters of your law, look after it
yourselves. I do not choose to be a judge of such
matters." With these words he drove them from
his judgment-seat with exactly the same fine Ro-
man contempt for the Jews and their religious
affairs as was subsequently expressed by Festus to
the sceptical Agrippa, and as had been expressed
previously by Pontius Pilate* to the tumultuous
Pharisees. Exulting at this discomfiture of the
hated Jews, and apparently siding with Paul, the
Greeks then went in a body, seized Sosthen( s, the
leader of the Jewish synagogue, and beat him in
full view of the Proconsul seated on his triounal.
This was the event at which Gallio looked ou with
such imperturbable disdain. What could it possibly
matter to him, the great Proconsul, whether the
Greeks beat a poor wretch of a Jew or not ? So
long as they did not make a riot, or give him any
further trouble about the matter, thev miijht beat
Sosthenes or any number of Jews black and blue
if it pleased them, for all he was likely to care.

What a vivid glimpse do we here obtain, from
the graphic picture of an eye-witness, of the daily

* Matt, xxvii. 24, " See ye to it." Cf. Acts xiv. 15, " L >nk ye to it."
Toleration existed in the Roman Empire, and the ma^^istrates often
interfered to protect the Jews from massacre ; but they absohitely and
persistently refused to trouble themselves with any attempt to under-
stand their doctrines or enter into their disputes. The tradition that
Gallio sent some of St. Paul's writings to his brother Seneca is utterly
absurd ; and indeed at this time (a. d. 54), St. Paul had written nothing
except the two Epistles to the Thessalonians. (See Conybcare ard
Ilowson, St. Paul, vol. i. ch. xii. ; Aubertin, Senhjiie et St Paul.)

1 8 SENECA.

life in an ancient provincial forum ; how completely
do we seem to catch sight for a moment of that
habitual expression of contempt which curled the
thin lips of a Roman aristocrat in the presence of
subject nations, and especially of Jews ! If Seneca
had come across any of the Alexandrian Jews in
his Egyptian travels, the only impression left on his
mind was that expressed by Tacitus, Juvenal, and
Suetonius, who never mention the Jews without ex-
ecration. In a passage, quoted by St. Augustine
{^De Civit. Dei^f vi. ii) from his lost book on Super-
stitions, Seneca speaks of the multitude of their pro-
selytes, and calls them '-'-gens scelei'atissima.^^^^ " a
inost criminal 7'ace,^^ It has been often conjec-
tured— it has even been seriously believed — that
Seneca had personal intercourse with St. Paul and
learnt from him some lessons of Christianity. The
scene on which we have just been gazing will show
us the utter unlikelihood of such a supposition. Pro-
bably the nearest opportunity which ever occurred to
bring the Christian Apostle into intellectual contact
with the Roman philosopher was this occasion, when
St. Paul was dragged as a prisoner into the presence
of Seneca's elder brother. The utter contempt and
indifference with which he was treated, the manner
in which he was summarily cut short before he could
even open his lips in his own defence, will give us
a just estimate of the manner in which Seneca would
have been likely to regard St. Paul. It is highly
improbable that Gallio ever retained the slightest im-
pression or memory of so every-day a circumstance

HIS FAMIL V AND EARL V YEARS. iq

as this, by which alone he is known to the world. It
is possible that he had not even heard the mere name
of Pa-ul, and that, if he ever thought of him at all, it
was only as a miserable, rai^ged, fanatical Jew, of dim
eyes and diminutive stature, who had once wished to
inflict upon him an harangue, and who had once come
for a few moments " betwixt the wind and his no-
bility." He would indeed have been unutterably
amazed if any one had whispered to him that well
nigfh the sole circumstance which would entitle him
to be remembered by posterity, and the sole event
of his life by which he would be at all generally
known, was that momentary and accidental relation
to his despised prisoner.

But Novatus — or, to give him his adopted name
Gallio — presented to his brother Seneca, and to the
rest of the world, a very different aspect from that
under which we are wont to think of him. By them
he was regarded as an illustrious declaim cr, in an age
when declamation was the most valued of all accom-
plishments. It was true that there was a sort of
" tinkle," a certain falsetto tone in his style, which
offended men of robust and severe taste ; but this
meretricious resonance of style was a matter of envy
and admiration when affectation was the rage, and
when the times were too enervated and too corrupt
for the manly conciseness and concentrated force of
an eloquence dictated by liberty and by passion.
He seems to have acquired both among his friends
and among strangers the epithet of '* dulcis," " the
charming- or fascinating Gallio:" "This is more,"

20 SENECA.

says the poet Statius, " than to have given Seneca to
the world, and to have begotten the sweet Gallio.''
Seneca's portrait of him is singularly faultless. He
says that no one was so gentle to any one as Gallio
was to every one ; that his charm of manner won
over even the people whom mere chance threw in his
way, and that such was the force of his natural good-
ness that no one suspected his behaviour, as though
it were due to art or sim.ulation. Speaking of flattery,
in his fourth book of Natural Questions he says to
his friend Lucilius, " I used to say to you that my
brother Gallio {tvhoin every one loves a little, even
people who cannot love him more) was wholly ignorant
of other vices, but even detested this. You might try
him in any direction. You began to praise his intel-
lect—an intellect of the highest and worthiest kind,
. . . and he walked away ! You began to praise his
moderation ; he instantly cut short your first words.
You began to express admiration for his blandness
and natural suavity of manner, . . . yet even here he
resisted your compliments ; and if you were led to
exclaim that you had found a man who could not be
overcome by those insidious attacks which every one
else admits, and hoped that he would at least tolerate
this compliment because of its truth, even on this
ground he would resist your flattery ; not as though
you had been awkward, or as though he suspected
that you were jesting with him, or had some secret
end in view, but simply because he had a horror of
every form of adulation." We can easily imagine that
Gallio was Seneca's favourite brother, and we are not

HIS FAMILY AND EARLY YEARS. 21

surprised to find that the philosopher dedicates to
him his three books on Anger, and his charming
little treatise " On a Happy Life."

0( the third brother, L. Annaeus Mela, we have
fewer notices ; but, from what we know, we should
conjecture that his character no less than his reputa-
tion was inferior to that of his brothers ; yet he seems
to have been the favourite of his father, who distinct-
ly asserts that his intellect was capable of every ex-
cellence, and superior to that of his brothers.* This,
however, may have been because Mela, "longing
onl}' to long for nothing," was content with his fath-
er's rank, and devoted himself wholly to the study of
eloquence. Instead of entering into public life, he
deliberately withdrew himself from all civil duties,
and devoted himself to tranquillity and ease. Appa-
rently he preferred to be a farmer-general {pnblica-
fitcs) and not a consul. His chief fame rests in the fact
that he was father of Lucan , the poet of the decadence
or declining literature of Rome. The only anecdote
about him which has come down to us is one that sets
his avarice in a very unfavorable light. When his
famous son, the unhappy poet, had forfeited his life,
as well»as covered himself with infamy by denoun-
cing his own mother Atilla in the conspiracy of Piso,
Mela, instead of being overwhelmed with shame and
agony, immediately began to collect with indecent
avidity his son's debts, as though to show Nero that
he felt no great sorrow for his bereavement. But this
vvas not enough for Nero's malice ; he told Mela tha*

* M. Ann. Sciicv. Contnn'. ii. Pmf.

22 SENECA.

he must follow his son, and Mela was forced to obey
the order, and to die.

■Doubtless Helvia, if she survived her sons and her
grandsons, must have bitterly rued the day when,
with her husband and her youngs children, she left the
quiet retreat of a life in Cordova. Each of the three
boys grew up to a man of genius, and each of them
grew up to stain his memory with deeds that had
been better left undone, and to die violent deaths by
their own hands or by a tyrant's will. Mela died as
we have seen ; his son Lucan and his brother Seneca
were driven to death by the cruel orders of Nero.-
Gallio, after stooping to panic-stricken supplications
for his own preservation, died ultimately by suicide.
It was a shameful and miserable end for them all,
but it was due partly to their own errors, partly to
the hard necessity of the degraded times in which
they lived.

CHAPTER II.

THE EDUCATION OF SENECA.

For a reason which I have already indicated — I
mean the habitual retience of the ancient writers
respecting the period of their boyhood — it is not
easy to form a ver}^ vivid conception of the kind
of education given to a Roman boy of good family
up to the age of fifteen, when he laid aside the
golden amulet and embroidered toga to assume a
more independent mode of life.

A few facts, however, we can gather from the scat-
tered allusions of the poets Horace, Juvenal, Martial,
and Persius. From these we learn that the school-
masters were for the most part underpaid and de-
spised,* while at the same time an erudition alike
minute and useless was rigidly demanded of them.
We learn also that they were exceedingly severe in
the infliction of corporal punishment ; Orbilius, tlie
schoolmaster of Horace, appears to have been a per-
fect Dr. Busby, and the poet Martial records with

* For the miseries of the literary class, and especially of school-
u. asters, see Juv. Sa/. vii.

D 23

2d SENECA.

indignation the barbarities of chastisement which he
daily witnessed.

Tne things taught were chiefly arithmetic, grammar
— both Greek and Latin — reading, and repetition of,
the chief Latin poets. There was also a good deal
of recitation and of theme-writing on all kinds of trite
historical subjects. The arithmetic seems to have
been mainly of a very simple and severely practical
kind, especially the computation of interest and
compound interest ; and the philology generally,
both grammar and criticism, was singularly narrow,
uninteresting, and useless. Of what conceivable ad-
vantage can it have been to any human being to
know the name of the mother of Hecuba, of the
nurse of Anchises, of the stepmother of Anchemolus,
the number of years Acestes lived, and how many
casks of wine the Sicilians gave to the Phrygians .?
Yet these were the despicable minuticB which every
schoolmaster was then expected to have at his fingers'
ends, and every boy-scholar to learn at the point of
the ferule— trash which was only fit to be unlearned
the moment it was known.

For this kind of verbal criticism and fantastic
archaeology, Seneca, who had probably gone through
it all, expresses a profound and very rational contempt.
In a rather amusing passage* he contrasts the kind of
use which would be made of a Virgil lesson by a phi-
losopher and a grammarian. Coming to the lines,

*• Each happiest clay for mortals speeds the first,
Then crowds disease behind and age accurst,"

* Ep. cviii.

HIS El JVC A TION. 25

the philosopher will point out why and in what sense
the early days of life are the best days, and how
rapidly the evil days succeed them, and consequently
how infinitely important it is to use well the golden
dawn of our being. But the verbal critic will content
himself with the remark that Virgil always usts fugio
of the flight of time, and always joins " old age " with
" disease," and consequently that these arc tags to be
remembered, and plagiarised hereafter in the pupils'
^^ original composition." Similarly, if the book in
hand be Cicero's treatise " On the Commonwealth,"
instead of entering into great political questions, our
grammarian will note that one of the Roman kings
had no father (to speak of), and another no mother ;
that dictators used formerly to be called " masters of
the people ; " that Romulus perished during an
eclipse ; that the old form of rcipsa w^as reapse, and
of se ipse was sepsc ; that the starting-point in the
circus which is now called creta, or "chalk," used to
be called calx, or career ; that in the time of
Ennius opera meant not only " work," but also
" assistance," and so on, and so on. Is this true
education } or rather, should our great aim ever be to
translate noble precepts into daily action .'* " Teach
me," he says, " to despise pleasure and glory ; after-
wards you shall teach me to disentangle difficulties, to
distinguish ambiguities, 'to see through obscurities ;
now teach me what is necessary." Considering the
condition of much which in modern times passes
under the name of " education," we may possibly find
that the hints of Seneca are not yet wholly obsolete.

26 SENi':CA.

What kind of schoolmaster taught the little Seneca
when under the care of the slave who was called
pccdagogiis, or " boy-leader " (whence our word
pedagogue), he daily went with his brothers to school
through the streets of Rome, we do not know. He
may have been a severe Orbilius, or he may have
been one of those noble-minded tutors whose ideal
portraiture is drawn in such beautiful colours by the
learned and amiable Ouintilian. Seneca has not
alluded to any one who taught him during his early
days. The only schoolfellow whom he mentions by
name in his voluminous writings is a certain Claranus,
a deformed boy, whom, after leaving school, Seneca
never met again until they were both old men, but
of whom he speaks with great admiration. In spite
of his hump-back, Claranus appeared even beautiful
in the eyes of those who knew him well, because his
virtue and good sense left a stronger impression than
his deformity, and " his body was adorned by the
beauty of his soul."

It was not until mere school-lessons were finished
that a boy began seriously to enter upon the studies of
eloquence and philosophy, which therefore furnish some
analogy to what we should call " a university educa-
tion." Gallio and Mela, Seneca's elder and younger
brothers, devoted themselves heart and soul to the
theory and practice of eloquence ; Seneca made the
rarer and the wiser choice in giving his entire en-
thusiasm to the study of philosophy.

I say the wiser choice, because eloquence is not a
thing for which one can give a receipt as one might

HIS EDUCATION, T,

give a receipt for making eau-de-Cologne. Eloquence
is the noble, the harmonious, the passionate expression
of truths profoundly realized, or of emotions intensely
felt. It is a flame which cannot be kindled by
artificial means. RJietoric may be taught if any one
thinks it worth learning ; but eloqjicnce is a gift as
innate as the genius from which it springs. " Ciijits
vitafulgttr^ ejus verba tojiitriia'^'' — " if a man's life be
lightning, his words will be thunders." But the kind
of oratory to be obtained by a constant practice of
declamation such as that which occupied the schools
of the Rhetors will be a very artificial lightning and a
very imitated thunder— not the artillery of heaven,
but the Chinese fire and rolled bladders of the stage.
Nothing could be more false, more hollow, more per-
nicious than the perpetual attempt to drill numerous
classes of youths into a reproduction of the mere
manner of the ancient orators. An age of unlimited
declamation, an age of incessant talk, is a hotbed in
which real depth and nobility of feeling runs miserably
to seed. Style is never worse than it is in ages which
employ themselves in teaching little else. Such teach-
ing produces an emptiness of thought concealed under
a plethora of words. This age of countless oratorical
masters was emphatically the period of decadence
and decay. There is a hollow ring about it, a falsetto
tone in its voice ; a fatiguing literary grimace in the
manner of its authors. Even its writers of genius were
injured and corrupted by the prevailing mode. They
can say nothing simply ; the)' are always in contor-
tions. Their very indignation and bitterness of heart,

d2

28 SENECA.

genuine as it is, assumes a theatrical form of ex
pression.* They abound in unreahties : their whok
manner is defaced with would-be cleverness, with
antitheses, epigrarns, paradoxes, forced expressions,
figures and tricks of speech, straining after originality
and profundity when they are merely repeating
x-ery commonplace remarks. What else could one
expect in an age of salaried declaimers, educated
in a false atmosphere of superficial talk, for ever
liciraiiguing and perorating about great passions
which they had never felt, and great deeds which they
would have been the last to imitate ? After per-
petually immolating the Tarquins and the Pisis-
tratids in inflated grandiloquence, they would go to lick
the dust off a tyrant's shoes. How could eloquence
survive when the magnanimity and freedom which
inspired it were dead, and when the men and books
which professed to teach it were filled with despicable
directions about the exact position in which the
orator was to use his hands, and as to whether it was
a good thing or not for him to slap his forehead
and disarrange his hair.-*

The philosophic teaching which even from boyhood
exercised a powerful fascination on the eager soul of
Seneca was at least something better than this ; and
more than one of his philosophic teachers succeeded in
winning his warm affection, and in moulding the prin-
C'ples and habits of his life. Two of them he mentioiis

* "Juvenal, eleve dans les cris de I'ecole

Poussa jusqu'a I'exces sa mordante hyperbole." —

Boilp:au.

HIS ED UCA TION. 39

with special res^ard, namely, Sotion the P3^thagorean,
and Attalus the Stoic. He also heard the lectures
of the fluent and musical Fabianus Papirius, but
seems to have owed less to him than to his other
teachers.

Sotion had embraced the views of Pythagoras
respecting- the transmigration of souls, a doctrine
which made the eating of animal food little better
than cannibalism or parricide. But, even if any of his
followers rejected this view, Sotion would still main-
tain that the eating of animals, if not an impiety, was
at least a cruelty and a waste. '* What hardships does
my advice inflict on you } " he used to ask. ** I do
but deprive you of the food of vultures and lions."
The ardent boy — for at this time he could not have
been more than seventeen years old — was so con-
vinced by these considerations that he became a
vegetarian. At first the abstinence from meat was
painful, but after a year he tells us (and many vege-
tarians will confirm his experience) it was not only
easy but delightful ; and he used to believe, though
he would not assert it as a fact, that it made his
intellect more keen and active. He only ceased to
be a vegetarian in obedience to the remonstrance of
his unphilosophical father, who would have easily
tolerated what he regarded as a mere vagary had it
not involved the danger of giving rise to a calumny.
For about this time Tiberius banished from Rome all
the followers of strange and foreign religions ; and, as
fasting was one of the rites practised in some of them,
Seneca^ father thought that, perhaps his son might

30 SENECA.

incur, by abstaining from meat, the horrible suspicion
of being a Christian or a Jew !

Another Pythagorean philosoper whom he admired
and whom he quotes was Sextius, from whom he
learnt the admirable practice of daily self-examina-
tion : — " When the day was over, and he betook him-
self to his nightly rest, he used to ask himself, What
evil have you cured to-day ? What vice have you
resisted ? In what particular have you improved ? "
" I too adopt this custom," says Seneca, in his book
on Anger, "and I daily plead my cause before myself,
when the light has been taken away, and my wife,
who is now aware of my habit, has become silent ; I
carefully consider in my heart the entire day, and
take a deliberate estimate of my deeds and words."

It was however the Stoic Attains who seems to
have had the main share in the instruction of Seneca ;
and his teaching did not involve any practical results
which the elder Seneca considered objectionable.
He tells us how he used to haunt the school of the
eloquent philosopher, being the first to enter and the
last to leave it. "When I heard him declaiming,"
he says, " against vice, and error, and the ills of life,
I often felt compassion for the human race, and
believed my teacher to be exalted above the ordinary
stature of mankind. In Stoic fashion he used to call
himself a king ; but to me his sovereignty seemed
more than royal, seeing that it was in his power to
pass his judgments on kings themselves. When he
began to set forth the praises of poverty, and to
show how heavy and superfluous was the burden

HIS ED UCA 7 ION. 3 1

of all that exceeded the ordinary wants of life, I
often longed to leave school a poor man. When
he began to reprehend our pleasures, to praise a
chaste body, a moderate table, and a mind pure
not from all unlawful but even from all superfluous
pleasures, it was my delight to set strict limits
to all voracity and gluttony. And these precepts,
my Lucilius, have left some permanent results ; for
I embraced thorn with impetuous eagerness, and
afterwards, when I entered upon a political career,
I retained a i^\N of my good beginnings. In con-
sequence of them, I have all my life long renounced
eating oysters and mushrooms, which do not satisfy
hunger but only sharpen appetite: for this reason
I habitually abstain from perfumes, because the
sweetest perfume for the body is none at all : for
this reason I do without wines and baths. Other
habits which I once abandoned have come back
to me, but in such a way that I merely substitute
moderation for abstinence, which perhaps is a still
more difficult task ; since there are some things which
it is easier for the mind to cut away altogether than
to enjoy in moderation. Attains used to recommend
a hard couch in which the body could not sink ; and,
even in. my old age, I use one of such a kind that it
leaves no impress of the sleeper. I have told you these
anecdotes to prove to you what eager impulses our
little scholars would have to all that is good, if any
one were to exhort them and urge them on. But the
harm springs partly from the fault of preceptors, who
teach us how to argue, not how to live ; and partly

32 SENECA.

from the fault of pupils, who bring to their teachers
a purpose of training their intellect and not their
souls. Thus it is that philosophy has been degraded
into mere philology."

In another lively passage, Seneca brings vividly
before us a picture of the various scholars assembled
in a school of the philosophers. After observing that
philosophy exercises some influence even over those
who do not go deeply in it, just as people sitting in a
shop of perfumes carry away with them some of the
odour, he adds, " Do we not, however, know some v/ho
have been among the audience of a philosopher for
many years, and have been even entirely uncoloured by
his teaching ? Of course I do, even most persistent and
continuous hearers ; whom I do not call pupils, but
mere passing auditors of philosophers. Some come
to hear, not to learn, just as we are brought into a
theatre for pleasure's sake, to delight our ears with
language, or with the voice, or with plays. You will
observe a large portion of the audience to whom
the philosopher's school is a mere haunt of their
leisure. Their object is not to lay aside any vices
there, or to accept any law in accordance with which
they may conform their life, but that they may enjoy
a mere tickling of their ears. Some, however, even
come with tablets in their hands, to catch up not
l/ujiss but ivords. Some with easer countenances
and spirits are kindled by magnificent utterances, and
these are charmed by the beauty of the thoughts, not
by the sound of empty words ; but the impression is
not lasting. Few only have attained the power of

HIS EDUCA TION. 33

carrying home with them the frame of mind into
which they had been elevated."

It was to this small latter class that Seneca
belonged. He became a Stoic from very early years.
The Stoic philosophers, undoubtedly the noblest and
purest of ancient sects, received their name from the
fact that their founder Zeno had lectured in the
Painted Porch or Stoa P.xcile of Athens. The
influence of these austere and eloquent masters,
teaching high lessons of morality and continence, and
inspiring their young audience with the glow of their
own enthusiasm for virtue, must have been invaluable
in that effete and drunken age. Their doctrines were
pushed to yet more extravagant lengths by the
Cynics, who were so called from a Greek word
meaning * dog," from what appeared to the ancients
to be the doglike brutality of their manners. Juvenal
scornfully remarks, that the Stoics only differed from
the Cynics " by a tunic," which the Stoics wore and
the Cynics discarded. Seneca never indeed adopted
the practices of Cynicism, but he often speaks ad-
miringly of the arch-Cynic Diogenes, and repeatedly
refers to the Cynic Demetrius, as a man deserving of
the very highest esteem. " I take with me every-
where," writes he to Lucilius, " that best of men,
Demetrius ; and, leaving those who wear purple robes,
I talk with him who is half-naked. Why should I not
admire him .'' I have seen that he has no want. Any
one may despise all things, but no one can possess all
things. The shortest road to riches lies through
contempt of riches. But our Demetrius lives not as

34 SENECA.

though he despised all things, but as though he
simply suffered others to possess them."

These habits and sentiments throw considerable
light on Seneca's character. They show that even
from his earliest days he was capable of adopting
self-denial as a principle, and that to his latest
days he retained many private habits of a simple
and honourable character, even when the exigencies
of public life had compelled him to modify others.
Although he abandoned an unusual abstinence out
of respect for his father, we have positive evidence
that he resumed in his old age the spare practices
which in his enthusiastic youth he had caught from
the lessons of high-minded teachers. These facts
are surely sufficient to refute at any rate those
gross charges against the private character of Seneca,
venomously retailed by a jealous Greekling like Dio
Cassius, which do not rest on a tittle of evidence,
and seem to be due to a mere spirit of envy and
calumny. I shall not again allude to these scandals
because 1 utterly disbelieve them. A man who in
his " History " could, as Dio Cassius has done, put
into the mouth of a Roman senator such insane false-
hoods as he has pretended that Fufius Calenus
uttered in full senate against Cicero, was evidently
actuated by a spirit which disentitles his statements
to any credence. Seneca was an inconsistent phi-
losopher both in theory and in practice ; he fell
beyond aH question into serious errors, which deeply
compromise his character; but, so far from being a
dissipated or luxurious man, there is every reason to

HIS EDUCATION. 35

believe that in the very midst of weahh and splen-
dour, and all the temptations which they involve,
he retained alike the simplicity of his habits and
the rectitude of his mind. Whatever may have
been the almost fabulous value of his five hundred
tables of cedar and ivory, they were rarely spread
with any more sumptuous entertainment than
water, vegetables, and fruit. Whatever may have
been the amusements common among his wealthy
and noble contemporaries, we know that he found
his highest enjoyment in the innocent pleasures of
his garden, and took some of his exercise by run-
nincr races there witli a little slave.

CHAPTER III.

THE STATE OF ROMAN SOCIETY.

We have gleaned from Seneca's own writings \\'hat
facts we could respecting his early education. But
in the life of every man there are influences of a far
more real and penetrating character than those which
come through the medium of schools or teachers.
The spirit of the age, the general tone of thought, the
prevalent habits of social intercourse, the political
tendencies which were moulding the destiny of the
nation, — these must have told, more insensibly indeed
but more powerfully, on the mind of Seneca than
even the lectures of Sotion and of Attalus. And, if
we have had reason to fear that there was much
which was hoUov/ in the fashionable education, we
shall see that the general aspect of the society by
which our young philosopher was surrounded from
the cradle was yet more injurious and deplorable.

The darkness is deepest just before the dawn, and
never did a grosser darkness or a thicker mist of
moral pestilence brood over the surface of Pagan
society than at the period when the Sun of Righteous-
ness arose with healing in His wings. There have

STATE OF ROMAN SOCIETY. 37

been many ages when the dense gloom of a heart-
less immorality seemed to settle down with unusual
weight ; there have been many places where, under
the gaslight of an artificial system, vice has seemed
to acquire an unusual audacity ; but never probably
was there any age or any place where the worst
forms of wickedness were practised with a more
unblushing eft'rontery than in the city of Rome under
the government of the Caesars. A deeply-seated
corruption seemed to have fastened upon the very
vitals of the national existence. It is surely a lesson
ot deep moral signihcance that just as they became
most polished in their luxury they became most vile
in their manner ot" life. Horace had already bewiiiled
that *' the age of our fathers, worse than that <^i
our grandsires, has produced us who are yet baser,
and who are doomed to give birth to a still more
degraded oft'spring." But fifty years later it seemed
to Juvenal that in his times the very final goal of
iniquity had been attained, and he exclaims, in a
burst of despair, that *' posterity will add notJiing to
our immorality ; our descendants can but do and
desire the same crimes as ourselves." He who would
see but for a moment and afar off to what the Gentile
world had sunk, at the very period when Christianity
began to spread, may form some faint and shuddering
conception from the picture of it drawn in the Epistle
to the Romans.

We ought to realize this fact if we would judge of
Seneca aright. Let us then glance at the condition
of the society in the midst of which he lived. Happily

38 SENECA.

we can but glance at it. The worst cannot be told.
Crimes may be spoken of; but things monstrous and
inhuman should for ever be concealed. We can but
stand at the cavern's mouth, and cast a single ray of
light into its dark depths. Were we to enter, our
lamp would be quenched by the foul things which
would cluster round it.

In the age of Augustus began that "long slow
agony," that melancholy process of a society gra-
dually going to pieces under the dissolving intiuence
of its own vices, which lasted almost without inter-
ruption till nothing was left for Rome except the fire
and sword of barbaric invasion. She saw not only
her glories but also her virtues " star by star expire."
The old heroism, the old beliefs, the old manliness
and simplicity, were dead and gone ; they had been
succeeded by prostration and superstition, by luxury
and lust.

" There is the moral of all human tales,
'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
First freedom, and then glory ; when that fails,
"Wealth, vice, corruption, — barbarism at last :
And history, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page ; 'tis better written here
Where gorgeous tyranny hatli thus amassed
All treasures, all delights, that eye or ear,
Heart, soul could seek, tongue ask."

The mere elements of society at Rome during this
period were very unpromising. It was a mixture of
extremes. There was no middle class. At the head
of it was an emperor, often deified in his lifetime, and
separated from even the noblest of the senators by

STATE OF ROMAN SOCIETY. 39

a distance of immeasurable superiority. He was, in
the startling language of Gibbon, at once "a priest,
an atheist, and a god." * Surrounding his person and
forming his court were usually those of the nobility
who were the most absolutely degraded by their
vices, their fiatteries, or their abject subservience.
But even these men were not commonly the reposi-
tories of political power. Ihe neople of the greatest
influence were the freedmen of the emperors — men
who had oeen slaves, Egyptians and Bithynians who
had come to Rome with bored ears and with chalk
on their naked feet to show that they were for sale,
or who had bawled " sea-urchins all alive " in the Vela-
brum or the Saburra — who had acquired enormous
wealth by means often the most unscrupulous and
the most degraded, and whose insolence and base-
ness had kept pace with their rise to power. Such
a man was the Felix before whom St. Paul was
tried, and such was his brother Pallas.f whose golden

* . "To the sound

Of fifes and drums they danced, or in the shade

Sung Casar gre-it and terrible in war,

Immortal Ca?sar ! * I>o, a god ! a god!

He cleaves the yielding skies ! ' Caesar meanwhile

Gathers the ocean pebbles, or the gnat

Enraged pursues ; or at his lonely meal

Starves a wide province ; tastes, dislikes, and flini^

To dogs and sycophants. * A god, a god ! '

The flowery shades and shrines obscene return."

Dyer, Ruins of Rome.

+ The pride of this man was sucli that he never deigned to speak a
word in the presence of his own slaves, but only made known his wishes
by signs 1 — Tachus.

k2

40 SENECA.

statue might have been seen among the house-
hold gods of the senator, afterwards the emperor,
Vitellius. Another of them might often have
been observed parading the streets between two
consuls. Imagine an Edward II. endowed with
absolute and unquestioned powers of tyranny, —
imagine some pestilent Piers Gaveston, or Hugh de
le Spenser exercising over nobles and people a hideous
despotism of the back stairs, — and you have some
faint picture of the government of Rome under some
of the twelve Caesars. What the barber (31ivier le
Diable was under Louis XI., what Mesdames du
Barri and Pompadour were under Louis XV., what
the infamous Earl of Somerset was under James
I., what George Villiers became under Charles I.,
will furnish us with a faint analogy of the far more
exaggerated and detestable position held by the
freedman Glabrio under Domitian, by the actor
Tigellinus under Nero, by Pallas and Narcissus under
Claudius, by the obscure knight Sejanus under the
iron tyranny of the gloomy Tiberius.

I. It was an age of the most enormous w^ealth
existing side by side with the most abject poverty.
Around the splendid palaces v/andered hundreds of
mendicants, who made of their mendicity a horrible
trade, and even went so far as to steal or mutilate
infants in order to move compassion by their hideous
maladies. This class was increased by the exposure
of children, and by that overgrown accumulation of
landed property which drove the poor from their native
fields. It was increased also by the ambitious attempt

STATE OF ROMAN SOCIETY. 4»

of people whose means were moderate to imitate the
enormous display of the numerous millionaires. The
great Roman conquests in the East, the plunder of
the ancient kingdoms of Antiochus, of Attalus, of
Mithridates, had caused a turbid stream of wealth to
flow into the sober current of Roman life. One reads
with silent astcnishm.ent of the sums expended by
wealthy Romans on tlicir magnificence or their plea-
sures. And as commerce was considered derogatory
to rank and position, and was therefore pursued by
men who had no character to lose, these overgrown
fortunes were often acquired by wretches of the
meanest stamp — by slaves brought from over the
sea, who had to conceal the holes bored in their ears;*
or even by malefactors who had to obliterate, by
artificial means, the three letters t which had been
branded by the executioner on their foreheads. But
many of the richest men in Rome, who had not
sprung from this convict origin, were fully as w^ell
deserving of the same disgraceful stigma. Their
houses were built, their coffers were replenished, from
the drained resources of'cxljausted provincials. Every
young man of active ambition or noble birth, whose
resources had been impoverished by debauchery and
extravagance, had but to borrow fresh sums in order
to give magnificent gladiatorial shows, and then, it

* This was a common ancient practice; the very words "thrall,''
"thraldom," are etymologically connected with the roots "thrill,^'
"trill," "drill." (Compare Exod. xxi. 6; Deut. xv. 17 ; Plut. Cu. 26;
and Juv. Sat. i. 104.)

t Fur, "thief." (See Martial, ii. 29.)

42 SENECA.

he could once obtain an asdileship, and mount to the
higher offices of the State, he would in time become
the procurator or proconsul of a province, which he
might pillage almost at his will. Enter the house
of a Felix or a Verres. Those splendid pillars of
mottled green marble were dug by the forced labour
of Phrygians from the quarries of Synnada ; that
embossed silver, those murrhine vases, those jewelled
cups, those masterpieces of antique sculpture, have
all been torn from the homes or the temples of Sicily
or Greece. Countries were pillaged and nations
crushed that an Apicius might dissolve pearls * in
the wine he drank, or that Lollia Paulina might
gleam in a second-best dress of emeralds and pearls
which had cost 40,000,000 sesterces, or more than

32,ooo/.t

Each of these " gorgeous criminals " lived in the
midst of a humble crowd of flatterers, parasites,
clients, dependants, and slaves. Among the throng
that at early morning jostled each other in the
marble atrium were to be found a motley and
heterogeneous set of men. Slaves of every age and
nation^ — Germans, Egyptians, Gauls, Goths, Syrians,
Britons, Moors, pampered and consequential freedmen,
impudent confidential servants, greedy buffoons, who
lived by making bad jokes at other people's tables ;
Dacian gladiators, with whom fighting was a trade ;
philosophers, whose chief claim to reputation was the

* "Dissolved pearls, Apicius' diet 'gainst the epilepsy." — Ben

JONSON.

+ Pliny actually saw her thus arrayed. (Nat. Hist. ix. 35, 36.)

STA TE OF ROMAN SOCIETY, 43

length of their beards ; supple Greeklings of the Tar-
tuffe species, ready to flatter and lie with consummate
skill, and spreading their vile character like a pollu-
tion wherever they went : and among all these a
number of poor but honest clients, forced quietly to
put up with a thousand forms of contumely * and
insult, and living in discontented idleness on the
spoi'tida or daily largesse which was administered by
the grudging liberality of their haughty patrons. The
stout old Roman burgher had weii-nigh disappeared ;
the sturdy independence, the m.anly self-reliance of
an industrial population were all but unknown. The
insolent loungers who bawled in the Forum were
often mere stepsons of Italy, who had been dragged
thither in chains, — the dregs of all nations, which
had flowed into Rome as into a common sewer,"!"
bringing with them no heritage except the speciality
of their national vices. Their two wants were bread
and the shows of the circus ; so long as the sportula of
their patrons, the occasional donative of an emperor,
and the ambition of political candidates supplied
these wants, they lived m contented abasement,
anxious neither for liberty nor for power.

II. It was an age at once of atheism and super-
stition. Strange to say, the two things usually go

* Few of the many sad pictures in the Satires of Juvenal are more
r)itiable than that of the wretched "Quirites" struggling at their patrons'
aoors for the pittance which formed their daily dole. (Sat. i. loi.)

t See Juv. Sat. iii. 62. Scipio, on being interrupted by the mob in
the Forum, exclaimed, — "Silence, ye stepsons of Italy ! What! shall
I fear these fellows now they are free, whom 1 myself have brought
in chains to Rome?" (See Cic. Dc Orat. ii. 61.)

44 SENECA.

together. Just as Philippe Egalite, Duke of Orleans,
disbelieved in God, and yet tried to conjecture his
fate from the inspection of coffee-grounds at the
bottom of a cup, — ^just as Louis XL shrank from no
perjury and no crime, and yet retained a profound
reverence for a little leaden image which he carried in
his cap, — so the Romans under the Empire sneered
at all the whole crowd of gods and goddesses
whom their fathers had worshipped, but gave an im-
plicit credence to sorcerers, astrologers, spirit-rappers,
exorcists, and every species of impostor and quack.
The ceremonies of religion were performed with
ritualistic splendour, but all belief in religion was
dead and gone. " That there are such things as
ghosts and subterranean realms not even boys believe,"
says Juvenal, " except those who are still too young
to pay a farthing for a bath."* Nothing can exceed
the cool impertinence with which the poet Martial
prefers the favour of Domitian to that of the great
Jupiter of the Capitol. Seneca, in his lost book
"Against Superstitions,"t openly sneered at the old
mythological legends of gods married and gods un-
married, and at the gods Panic and Paleness, and at
Cloacina, the goddess of sewers, and at other deities
whose cruelty and licence would have been infamous
even in mankind. And yet the priests, and Salii, and
Flamens, and Augurs continued to fulfil their solemn
functions, and the highest title of the Emperor himself

* Juv. Sat. ii. 149, Cf. Sen. Ep. xxiv. " Nemo tarn puer est at
Cerberum timeat, et tenebras," &c.
+ Fragm. xxxiv.

STATE OF ROMAN SOCIETY. 45

was that of Pontifcx Maximiis, or Chief Priest, which
he claimed as the recognised head of the national
religion. " The common worship was regarded," says
Gibbon, " by the people as equally true, by the philo-
sophers as equally false, and by the magistrates as
equally useful." And this famous remark is little more
than a translation from Seneca, who, after exposing
the futility of the popular beliefs, adds : " And yet
the wise man will observe them all, not as pleasing to
the gods, but as commanded by the laws. We shall
so adore all that ignoble crowd of gods which long
superstition has heaped together in a long period 01
years, as to remember that their worship has more to
do with custom than with reality." " Because he was
an illustrious senator of the Roman people," observes
St. Augustine, who has preserved for us this fragment,
** he worshipped what he blamed, he did what he
refuted, he adored that with which he found fault."
Could anything be more hollow and heartless than
this } Is there anything which is more certain to
sap the very foundations of morality than the public
maintenance of a creed which has long ceased to
command the assent, and even the respect, of its
recognised defenders t Seneca, indeed, and a few
enlightened philosophers, might have taken refuge
from the superstitions which they abandoned in a
truer and purer form of faith. ** Accordingly," says
Lactantius, one of the Christian Fathers, '* he has said
many things like ourselves concerning God."* Ii«
utters what TertuUian finely calls "the testimony

* Lactantius, Dh'tn. Insl. i. 4,

46 SENECA.

of A MIND NATURALLY CHRISTIAN." But, mean-
while, what became of the common muhitude ? They
too, like their superiors, learnt to disbelieve or to
question the power of the ancient deities ; but, as the
mind absolutely requires some religion on which to
rest, they gave their real devotion to all kinds of
strange and foreign deities, — to Isis and Osiri-i, and
the dog Anubis, to Chaldaean magicians, to Jewish
exorcisers, to Greek quacks, and to the wretched
vagabond priests of Cybele, who infested all the
streets with their Oriental dances and tinkling tam-
bourines. The visitor to the ruins of Pompeii may
still see in her temple the statue of Isis, through
whose open lips the gaping worshippers heard the
murmured answers they came to seek. No doubt
they believed as firmly that the image spoke, as our
forefathers believed that their miraculous Madonnas
nodded and winked. But time has exposed the cheat.
By the ruined shrine the worshipper may now see
the secret steps by vv'hich the priest got to the back
of the statue, and the pipe entering the back of its
head through which he whispered the answers of the
oracle.

III. It was an age of boundless luxury, — an age in
which women recklessly vied with one another in the
race of splendour and extravagance, and in which
men plunged headlong, without a single scruple of
conscience, and with every possible resource at their
command, into the pursuit of pleasure. There was
no form of luxury, there was no refinement of vice
invented by any foreign nation, which had not been

STATE OF ROMAN SOCIETY. 47

eagerly adopted by the Roman patricians. " Th(3
softness of Sybaris, the manners of Rhodes and
Antioch, and of perfumed, drunken, flower-crowned
Miletus," were all to be found at Rome. There was
no more of the ancient Roman severity and dignity
and self-respect. The descendants of ^milius and
Gracchus — even generals and consuls and praetors —
mixed familiarly with the lowest canaille of Rome in
their vilest and most squalid purlieus of shameless
vice. They fought as amateur gladiators in the arena.
They drove as competing charioteers on the race-
course. They even condescended to appear as actors
on the stage. They devoted themselves with such
frantic eagerness to the excitement of gambling,
that we read of their staking hundreds of pounds
on a single throw of the dice, when they could not
even restore the pawned tunics to their shivering
slaves. Under the cold marble statues, or amid the
waxen likenesses of their famous stately ancestors, they
turned night into day with long and foolish orgies,
and exhausted land and sea with the demands of
their gluttony. " Woe to that city," says an ancient
proverb, "in which a fish costs more than an ox;"
and this exactly describes the state of Rome. A
banquet would sometimes cost the price of an estate ;
shell-fish were brought from remote and unknown
shores, birds from Parthia and the banks of the
Phasis ; single dishes were made of the brains of
the peacocks and the tongues of nightingales and
flamingoes. Apicius, after squandering nearly a
million of money in the pleasures of the table, com-

4^ SENECA.

mitted suicide, Seneca tells us, because he found that
he had only 80,000/. left. Cowley speaks of —

" Vitellius' table, which did hold
As many creatures as the ark of old."

" They eat," said Seneca, " and then they vomit ; they
vomit, and then they eat." But even in this matter
we cannot tell anything like the worst facts about —

" Their sumptuous gluttonies and gorgeous feasts
On citron tables and Atlantic stone,
Their wines of Hetia, Cales, and Faleme,
Chios, and Crete, and how they quaff in gold.
Crystal, and myrrhine cups, embossed with gema
And studs of pearl."*

Still less can we pretend to describe the unblushing
and unutterable degradation of this period as it is
revealed to us by the poets and the satirists. "All
things," says Seneca, "■ are full of iniquity and vice ;
more crime is committed than can be remedied by
restraint. We struggle in a huge contest of crimi-
nality : daily the passion for sin is greater, the shame
in committing it is less. . . . Wickedness is no longer
committed in secret : it flaunts before our eyes, and

* Compare the lines in Dyer's little-remembered Ruins of Romef —

" The citron board, the bowl embossed with gems,
whate'er is known
Of rarest acquisition ; Tyrian garbs,
Neptunian Albion's high testaceous food,
And flavoured Chian wines, with incense fumed,
To slake patrician thirst : for these their rights
In the vile streets they prostitute for sale.
Their ancient rights, their dignities, their laws,
Their native glorious freedom."

STATE OF ROMAN SOCIETY. 49

has been sent forth so openly into piibHc sight, and
nas prevailed so completely in the breast of all, that
innocence is not rare, but non-existent!'

IV. And it was an age of deep sadness. That it
should have been so is an instructive and solemn lesson.
In proportion to the luxury of the age were its misery
and its exhaustion. The mad pursuit of pleasure
was the death and degradation of all true happiness.
Suicide — suicide out of pure enmii and discontent at
a life overflowing with every possible means of in-
dulgence— was extraordinarily prevalent. The Stoic
philosophy, especially as we see it represented in
the tragedies attributed to Seneca, rang with the
glorification of it. Men ran to death because their
mode of life had left them no other refuge. They
died because it seemed so tedious and so superfluous
to be seeing and doing and saying the same things
over and over again; and because they had exhausted
the very possibility of the only pleasures of which
they had left themselves capable. The satirical
epigram of Destoriches, —

" Ci-git J-.-aa Rosbif, eciiyer,
Qui se pendit pour se desenKuyer,"

was literally and strictly true of many Romans during
this epoch. Marcellinus, a young and wealthy noble,
starved himself, and then had himself suffocated in a
warm bath, merely because he was attacked with a
perfectly curable illness. The philosophy which
alone professed itself able to heal men's sorrows
3})plauded the supposed courage of a voluntary death,

?o SENECA,

.and it was of too abstract, too fantastic, and too
purely theoretical a character to furnish them with any
real or lasting consolations. No sentiment caused
more surprise to the Roman world than the famous
one preserved in the fragment of Mcccenaa, —

" Debilem facito manii,

Debilem pede, coxH.
l\:ber adstrue gibbemm,

Lubricos quale denies ;
Vila dum superest bene est ;

Hap.c raihi vel acuta
SI sedeain cruce sustLi€. ; '*

whtVh may be paraphrased, —

" Numb niy hands with palsy.

Rack my feet with gout,
Himch my back and shoulder.

Let my teeth fall out ;
Still, if Life be granted,

I prefer the loss :
Save my life, and give me

Anguish on the cross."

Seneca, in his lOist Letter, calls this *'a most dis-
graceful and most contemptible wish ;" but it may
be paralleled out of Euripides, and still more closely
out of Homer. " Talk not," says the shade of Achilles
to Ulysses in the Odyssey, —

" * Talk not of reigning in this dolorous gloom,

Nor think vain lies,' he cried, 'can ease my doom.
Better by far laboriously to bear
A weight of woes, and breathe the vital air^
Slave to the meanest hind that begs his breaa^
Than reign the sceptred monarch of the dead.***

STATE OF ROMAN SOCIETY. 51

But this falsehood of extremes was one of the sad
outcomes of the popular Paganism. Either, Hke the
natural savage, they dreaded death with an intensity
of terror; or, when their crimes and sorrows had made
life unsupportable, they slank to it as a refuge, with a
cowardice which vaunted itself as courage.

V. And it was an age of cruelty. The shows of
gladiators, the sanguinary combats of wild beasts, the
not unfrequent spectacle of savage tortures and capital
punishments, the occasional sight of innocent martyrs
burning to death in their shirts of pitchy fire,
must have hardened and imbruted the public sensi-
bility. The immense prevalence of slavery tended still
more inevitably to the general corruption. " Lust,"
as usual, was *'hard by hate." One hears with per-
fect amazement of the number of slaves in the
wealthy houses. A thousand slaves was no extra-
vagant number, and the vast majority of them were
idle, uneducated, and corrupt. Treated as little better
than animals, they lost much of the dignity of men.
Their masters possessed over them the power of life
and death, and it is shocking to read of the cruelty
with which they were often treated. An accidental
murmur, a cough, a sneeze, was punished with rods.
Mute, motionless, fasting, the slaves had to stand by
while their masters supped. A brutal and stupid
barbarity often turned a house into the shambles of an
executioner, sounding with scourges, chains, and yells.*
One evening the Emperor Augustus was supping at
the house of Vedius Pollio, when one of the slaves, who

* Juv. Sai. vi. 219 — 222.
.1 F 2

52 SENECA.

was carrying a crystal goblet, slipped down, and broke
it. Transported with rage Vedius at once ordered the
slave to be seized, and plunged into the fish-pond as
food to the lampreys. The boy escaped from the
hands of his fellow-slaves, and fled to Caesar's feet
to implore, not that his life should be spared — a
pardon which he neither expected nor hoped — but
that he might die by a. mode of death less horrible
than being devoured by fishes. Common as it was to
torment slaves, and to put them to death, Augustus.
to his honour be it spoken, was horrified by the cruelly
of Vedius, and commanded both that the slave should
be set free, that every crystal vase In the house of
Vedius should be broken in his presence, and that
the fish-pond should be filled up. Even women In-
flicted upon their female slaves punishments of the
most cruel atrocity for faults of the most venial
character. A brooch wrongly placed, a tress of hair
ill-arranged, and the enraged matron orders her slave
to be lashed and crucified. If her milder husband
interferes, she not only justifies the cruelty, but asks
in amazement : " What ! is a slave so much of a
human being .'* " No wonder that there was a pro-
verb, "As many slaves, so many foes." No wonder
that many masters lived in perpetual fear, and that
" the tyrant's devilish plea, necessity," might be
urged in favour of that odious law which enacted
that, if a master was murdered by an unknown hand,
the whole body of his slaves should^ suffer death,' —
a law which more than once was carried into effect
under the reigns of the Emperors. Slavery, as v.c

STATE OF ROMAN SOCIETY. 53

see in the case of Sparta and many other nations,
always involves its own retribution. The class of
free peasant proprietors gradually disappears. Long
before this time Tib. Gracchus, in coming home from
Sardinia, had observed that there was scarcely a single
freeman to be seen in the fields. The slaves were
infinitely more numerous than their owners. Hence
arose the constant dread of servile insurrections ; the
constant hatred of a slave population to which any
conspirator or revolutionist might successfully appeal ;
and the constant insecurity of life, which must have
struck terror into many hearts.

Such is but a faint and broad outline of some of
the features of Seneca's age ; and we shall be unjust
if we do not admit that much at least of the life he
lived, and nearly all the sentiments he uttered, gain
much in grandeur and purity from the contrast they
offer to the common life of —

*' That people victor once, now vile and base,

Deservedly maJe vassal, who, once just,
. Frugal, and mild, and temperate, conquered well,
But govern ill the nations under yoke,
Peeling their provinces, exhausted all
By lust and rapine ; first ambitious grown
Of triumph, that insulting vanity;
Then cruel, by their spoils to blood inured
Of fighting beasts, and men to beasts exposed.
Luxurious by their wealth, and greedier still,
And from the daily scene effeminate.
What wise and valiant man would seek to free
These thus degenerate, by themselves enslaved ;
Or could of inward slaves make outward free ? "

Milton, Paradise Regained, iv. 132-145.

CHAPTER IV.

POLITICAL CONDITION OF ROME UNDER TIBERIUS AND CAIUS.

The personal notices of Seneca's life up to the
}-»eriod of his manhood are slight and fragmentary.
From an incidental expression we conjecture that
he visited his aunt in Egypt when her husband was
Prefect of that country, and that he shared with her
the dangers of shipwreck when her husband had
died on board ship during the homeward voyage.
Possibly the visit may have excited in his mind that
deep interest and curiosity about the phenomena of
the Nile which appear so strongly in several pas-
sages of his Natural ^lesttons ; and, indeed noth-
ing is more likely than that he suggested to Nero the
earliest recorded expedition to discover the source of
the mysterious river. No other allusion to his travels
occurs in his writings, but we may infer that from
very early days he had felt an interest for physical in-
quiry, since while still a youth he had written a book
on earthquakes, which has not come down to us.

Deterred by his father from the pursuit of philoso-
phy, he entered on the duties of a profession . He be-
came an advocate, and distinguished himself by his
54

ROME UNDER TIBERIUS AND CAWS. 55

genius and eloquence in pleading causes. Entering
on a political career, he became a successful candidate
for the quaestorship, which was an important step
towards the highest offices of the state. During this
period of his life he married a lady whose name has
not been preserved to us, and to whom we have only-
one allusion, which is a curious one. As in our own
history it has been sometimes the fashion for ladies of
rank to have dwarves and negroes among their at-
tendants, so it seems to have been the senseless and
revolting custom of the Roman ladies of this time to
keep idiots among the number of their servants. The
first wife of Seneca had followed this fashion, and
Seneca in iiis fiftieth letter to his friend Lucilius*
makes the following interesting allusion to the fact.
"You know^" he says, **that my wife's idiot girl
Harpaste has remained in my house as a burdensome
legacy. For personally I feel the profoundest dislike
to monstrosities of that kind. If ever I want to
amuse myself with an idiot, I have not far to look for
one. I laugh at myself This idiot girl has suddenly
become blind. Now, incredible as the story seems, it
is really true that she is unconscious of her blindness,

* It will be_observecl that the main biographical facts about the life
of Seneca are to be gleaned from his letters to Lucilius, who was his
constant friend from youth to old age, and to whom he has dedicated his
Natural Questions. Lucilius was a procurator of Sicily, a man of cul-
tivated taste and high principle. He was the author of a poem on
/Etna, which in the opinion of many competent judges is the poem
which has con)e down to us, and has been attributed to Varus, Virgil,
and others. It has been admirably edited by Mr. Munro. (See Nat.
Quccsl. iv. ad iiiH. Ep. Ixxix. ) He also wrote a poem on the fountain
Arethusa. {Nat. Qjurst. iii. 26.)

56 SENECA.

and consequently begs her attendant to go elsewhere,
because the house is dark. But you may be sure that
this, at which we laugh in her, happens to us all ; no
one understands that he is avaricious or covetous.
The blind seek for a guide ; ive wander about without
a guide."

This passage v/ill furnish us with an excellent
example of Seneca's invariable method of improving
every occasion and circumstance into an opportunity
for a philosophic harangue.

By this wife, who died shortly before Seneca's
banishment to Corsica, he had two sons, one of whom
expired in the arms and amid the kisses of Helvia
less than a month before Seneca's departure for
Corsica. To the other, whose name was Marcus, he
makes the following pleasant allusion. After urging
his mother Helvia to find consolation in the devotion
of his brothers Gallio and Mela, he adds, "From these
turn your eyes also on your grandsons — to Marcus,
that most charming little boy, in sight of whom no
melancholy can last long. No misfortune in the
breast of any one can have been so great or so recent
as not to be soothed by his caresses. Whose tears
would not his mirth repress .? whose mind would not
his prattling loose from the pressure of anxiety }
whom will not that joyous manner of his incline to
jesting } whose attention, even though he be fixed in
thought, will not be attracted and absorbed by that
childlike garrulity of which no one can grow tired ?
God grant that he may survive me: may all the
cruelty of destiny be wearied out on me ! "

ROME UI^DER TIBERIUS AND CAIUS. S7

Whether the prayer of Seneca was granted wc
do not know ; but, as we do not again hear of Marcus,
it is probable that he died before his father, and that
the Hne of Seneca, Hke that of so many great men,
became extinct in the second generation.

It was probably during this period that Seneca
laid the foundations of that enormous fortune which
excited the hatred and ridicule of his opponents.
There is every reason to believe that this fortune was
honourably gained. As both his father and mother
were wealthy, he had doubtless inherited an ample
competency ; this was increased by the lucrative
profession of a successful advocate, and was finally
swollen by the princely donations of his pupil Nero.
It is not improbable that Seneca, like Cicero, and like
all the wealthy men of their day, increased his pro-
perty by lending money upon interest. No disgrace
attached to such a course; and as there is no proof
for the charges of Dio Cassius on this head, we may
pass them over _with silent contempt. Dio gravely
informs us that Seneca excited an insurrection in
Britain, by suddenly calling in the enormous sum of
40,000,000 sesterces ; but this is in all probability the
calumny of a professed enemy. We shall refer again
to Seneca's wealth ; but we may here admit that it was
undoubtedly ungraceful and incongruous in a philo-
sopher who was perpetually dwelling on the praises
of poverty, and that even in his own age it attracted
unfavourable notice, as we may see from the epithet
Prcedives^ " the over-wealthy," which is applied to him
alike by a satiric poet and by a grave historian.

5$ SENECA.

Seneca was perfectly well aware that this objection
could be urged against him, and it must be admitted
that the grounds on which he defends himself in his
treatise O^i a Happy Life are not very conclusive or
satisfactory.

The boyhood of Seneca fell in the last years of
the Emperor Augustus, when, in spite of the general
decorum and amiability of their ruler, people began
to see clearly that nothing was left of liberty except
the name. His youth and early manhood were spent
during those three-and-twenty years of the reign of
Tiberius, tlTat reign of terror, during which the
Roman world was reduced to a frightful silence and
torpor as of death ; * and, although he was not thrown
into personal collision with that *' brutal monster," he
not unfrequently alludes to him, and to the dangerous
power and headlong ruin of his wicked minister
Sejanus. Up to this time he had not experienced
in his own person those crimes and horrors which fall
to the lot of men who are brought into close contact
with tyrants. This first happened to him in the reign
of Caius Caesar, of whom we are enabled, from the
writings of Seneca alone, to draw a full-length portrait.

Caius Csesar was the son of Germanicus and the
elder Agrippina. Germanicus was the bravest and
most successful general, and one of the wisest and
most virtuous men, of his day. His wife Agrippina,
in her fidelity, her chastity, her charity, her nobility

* Milton, Paradise Regained, iv. 128. P'or a picture of Tiberius as
he appeared in his old age at Caprese, "hated of all, and hating," see
Id. 90 — 97.

ROME UNDER TIBERIUS AND CAWS. 59

of mind, was the very model of a Roman matron of
the highest and purest stamp. Strange that the son
of such parents should have been one of the vilest
cruelest, and foulest of the human race. So, however,
it was ; and it is a remarkable fact that scarcely one of
the six children of this marriage displayed the virtues
of their father and mother, while two of them, Caius
Caesar and the younger Agrippina, lived to earn an
exceptional infamy by their baseness and their crimes.
Possibly this unhappy result may have been partly
due to the sad circumstances of their early education.
Their father, Germanicus, who by his virtue and his
successes had excited the suspicious jealousy of his
uncle Tiberius, was by his distinct connivance, if not
by his actual suggestion, atrociously poisoned in Syria.
Agrippina, after being subjected to countless cruel
insults, was banished in the extremest poverty to the
island of Pandataria. Two of the elder brothers, Nero
and Drusus Germanicus, were proclaimed public ene-
mies : Nero was banished to the island Pontia, and
there put to death ; Drusus was kept a close prisoner
in a secret prison of the palace. Caius, the youngest,
who is better known by the name Caligula, was
summoned by Tiberius to his wicked retirement at
Caprea;, and there only saved his life by the most
abject flattery and the most adroit submission.

Capreae is a little island of surpassing loveliness,
forming one extremity of the Bay of Naples. Its
soil is rich, its sea bright and limpid, its breezes cool
and healthful. Isolated by its position, it is yet
within easy reach of Rome. At that time, before

G

6o SENECA.

Vesuvius had rekindled those wasteful fires which
first shook down, and then deluged under lava and
scoriae, the little cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii,
the scene which it commanded was even more pre-
eminently beautiful than now. Vineyards and olive-
groves clothed the sides of that matchless bay, down
to the very line where the bright blue waters seem to
kiss with their ripples the many-coloured pebbles of
the beach. Over all, with its sides dotted with pic-
turesque villas and happy villages, towered the giant
cone of the volcano which for centuries had appeared
to be extinct, and which was clothed up to the very
crater with luxurious vegetation. Such was the deli-
cious home which Tiberius disgraced for ever by the
seclusion of his old age. Here he abandoned himself
to every refinement of wickedness, and from hence,
being by comm.on consent the most miserable of men,
he wrote to the Senate that memorable letter in which
he confesses his daily and unutterable misery under
the stings of a guilty conscience, which neither soli-
tude nor power enabled him to escape.

Never did a fairer scene undergo a worse degra-
dation ; and here, in one or other of the twelve villas
which Tiberius had built, and among the azure
grottoes which he caused to be constructed, the
youthful Caius'"^ grew up to manhood. It would have

* We shall call him Caius, because it is as little correct to write of
him by the sobriquet Caligula as it would be habitually to write of our
kings Edward or John as Longshanks or Lackland, The name Caligula
means "a little shoe," and was the pet name given to him by the
soldiers of his father, in whose camp he was born.

RO}fE UNDER TIBERIUS AND CAIUS. 61

been a terrible school even for a noble nature ; for a
nature corrupt and bloodthirsty like that of Caius it
was complete and total ruin. But, though he was so
obsequious to the Emperor as to originate the jest
that never had there been a worse master and never
a more cringing slave, — though he suppressed every
sign of indignation at the horrid deaths of his mo-
ther and his brothers, — though he assiduously re-
flected the looks, and carefully echoed the very
words, of his patron, — yet not even by the deep dis-
simulation which such a position required did he suc-
ceed in concealing from the penetrating eye of Tibe-
rius the true ferocity of his character. Not being the
acknowledged heir to the kingdom, — for Tiberius
Gemellus, the youthful grandson of Tiberius, was
living, and Caius was by birth only his grand-
nephew, — he became a tool for the machinations of
Marco the praetorian prasfect and his wife Ennia.
One of his chief friends was the cruel Herod Agrip-
pa,* who put to death St. James and imprisoned St.
Peter, and whose tragical fate is recorded in the 12th
chap, of the x\cts. On one occasion, when Caius had
been abusing the dictator Sulla, Tiberius scornfully
remarked that he would have all Sulla's vices and
none of his virtues ; and on another, after a quarrel
between Caius and his cousin, the Emperor em-
braced with tears his young grandson, and said to the
frowning Caius, with one of those strange flashes of

* Josephus adds some curious and interesting particulars to the story
of this Herod and his death which are not mentioned in the narrative
of SL Luke. (Antii/. xix. 7, 8. Jah;i, //,;'»'. Commnnwc-ill/i, § cxwi.)

62 SENECA

prevision of which we sometimes read in history,
" Why are you so eager ? Some day you will kill
this boy, and some one else will murder you." There
were some who believed that Tiberius deliberately
cherished the intention of allowing Caius to succeed
him, in order that the Roman world might relent
towards his own memory under the tyranny of a
worse monster than himself Even the Romans, who
looked up to the famiily of Germanicus with extra-
ordinary affection, seem early to have lost all hopes
about Caius. They looked for little improvement
under the government of a vicious boy, ** ignorant oi
all things, or nurtured only in the worst," who would
be likely to reflect the influence of Macro, and
present the spectacle of a worse Tiberius under a
w^orse Sejanus.

At last healtlf and strength failed Tiberius, but not
his habitual dissimulation. He retained the same
unbending soul, and by his fixed countenance and
measured language, sometimes by an artificial afla-
bility, he tried to conceal his approaching end. After
many restless changes, he finally settled down in a
villa at Misenum which had once belonged to the
luxurious LucuUus. There the real state of his
health was discovered. Charicles, a distinguished
physician, who had been paying him a friendly visit
on kissing his hand to bid farewell, managed to
ascertain the state of his pulse. Suspecting that this
was the case, Tiberius, concealing his displeasure,
ordered a banquet to be spread, as though in honour
of his friend's departure, and stayed longer than

ROME UNDER TIBERIUS AND CAIUS. 63

usual at table. A similar story is told of Louis XIV
who, noticing from the whispers of his courtiers that
they believed him to be dying, ate an unusually large
dinner on the very day of his death, and sarcastically
observed, " U me semble que pour un homme qui va
mourir je ne mange pas mal." But, in spite of the
precautions of Tiberius, Charicles informed Macro
that the Emperor could not last beyond two days.

A scene of secret intrigue at once began. The court
broke up into knots and cliques. Hasty messengers
were sent to the provinces and their armies, until at
last, on the i6th of March, it was believed that
Tiberius had breathed his last. Just as on the death
of Louis X Y. a sudden noise was heard as of thunder,
the sound of courtiers rushing along the corridors to
congratulate Louis XVI. in the famous words, " Le
roi est mort. vi\T. le roi," so a crowd instantly thronged
round Caius with their congratulations, as he went
out of the palace to assume his imperial authority.
Suddenly a message reached him that Tiberius had
recovered voice and sight. Seneca says, that feeling
his last hour to be near, he had taken off his ring,
and, holding it in his shut left hand, had long lain
motionless ; then calling his servants, since no one
answered his call, he rose from his couch, and, his
strength failing him, after a i^w tottering steps fell
prostrate on the ground.

The news produced the same consternation as that

which was produced among the conspirators at

Ad^nijah's banquet, when they heard of the measures

taken by the dying David. There was a panic-

o2

64 SENECA,

stricken dispersion, and every one pretended to be
grieved, or ignorant of what was going on. Caius, in
stupified silence, expected death instead of empire.
Macro alone did not lose his presence of mind. With
the utmost intrepidity, he gave orders that the old
man should be suffocated by heaping over him a
mass of clothes, and that every one should then leave
the chamber. Such was the miserable and unpitied
end of the Emperor Tiberius, in the seventy-eighth
year of his age. Such was the death, and so mise-
rable had been the life, of the man to whom the
Tempter had already given "the kingdoms of the
world and the glory of them," when he tried to tempt
with them the Son of God. That this man should
have been the chief Emperor of the earth at a time
when its true King was living as a peasant in his
village home at Nazareth, is a fact sugp:estive ot many
and of solemn thoughts.

CHAPTER V.

THE REIGN OF CAIUS.

The poet Gray, in describing the deserted deathbed
of our own great Edward III., says : —

" Low on his funeral couch he lies !
No pitying heart, no eye afford
A tear to grace his obsequies !

*****

The swarm that in the noontide beam were bom?
Gone to salute the rising Morn.
Fair laughs the Morn, and soft the zephyr blows.
While proudly riding o'er the azure realm,
In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes ;
Youth on the prow and Pleasure at the lielm ;
Regardless of the sweeping Whirlwind's sway,
That, hushed in grim repose, expects his evcnmg prey."

The last lines of this passage would alone have been
applicable to Caius Caesar. There was nothing fair or
gay even about the beginning of his reign. From first
to last it was a reign of fury aiul madness, and lust
and blood. There was an hereditary taint of insanity
in this family, which was developed by their being
placed on the dizzy pinnacle of imperial despotism,
and which usually took the form of monstrous and
abnormal crime. If we would seek a parallel for

66 SENECA.

Caius Cassar, we must look for it in the history of
Christian VII. of Denmark, and Paul of Russia. In all
three we find the same ghastly pallor, the same sleep-
lessness which compelled them to rise, and pace their
rooms at night, the same incessant suspicion, the same
inordinate thirst for cruelty and torture. He took a
very early opportunity to disembarrass himself of his
benefactors. Macro and Ennia, and of his rival, the
young Tiberius. The rest of his reign was a series of
brutal extravagances. We have lost the portion of
those matchless Annals of Tacitus which contained
the reign of Caius, but more than enough to revolt
and horrify is preserved in the scattered notices of
Seneca, and in the narratives of Suetonius in Latia
and of Dio Cassius in Greek.

His madness showed itself sometimes in gluttonous
extravagance, as when he ordered a supper which cost
more than 8,000/. ; sometimes in a bizarre and dis-
graceful mode of dress, as v;hen ?ie appeared in public
in women's stockings, embroidered with gold and
pearls ; sometimes in a personality and insolence of
demeanour towards every rank and class in Rome,
which made him ask a senator to supper, and ply
him with drunkeri toasts, on the very evening on
which he had condemned his son to death ; sometimes
in sheer raving blasphemy, as when he expressed his
furious indignation against Jupiter for presuming to
thunder while he was supping, or looking at the
pantomimes ; but most of all in a ferocity which
makes Seneca apply to him the name of " Bellua," or
** wild monster," and say that he seems to have been

THE REIGN OF CAIUS. 67

produced " for the disgrace and destruction of the
human race."

We will quote from the pages of Seneca but one
single passage to justify his remark "that he was
most greedy for human blood, which he ordered to
stream in his very presence with such eagerness as
though he were going to drink it up with his lips."
He says that in one day he scourged and tortured
men of consular and quaestorial parentage, knights,
and senators, not by way of examination, but out of
pure caprice and rage; he seriously meditated the
butchery of the entire Senate ; he expressed a wish
that the Roman people had but a single neck, that he
might strike it off at one blow ; he silenced the screams
or reproaches of his victims sometimes by thrusting a
sponge in their mouths, sometimes by having their
mouths gagged with their own torn robes, sometimes
by ordering their tongues to be cut out before they
were thrown to the wild beasts. On one occasion,
rising from a banquet, he called for his slippers, which
were kept by the slaves while the guests reclined on
the purple couches, and so impatient was he for the
sight of death, that, walking up and down his covered
portico by lamplight with ladies and senators, he then
and there ordered some of his wretched victims to be
beheaded in his sight.

It is a singular proof of the unutterable dread
and detestation inspired by some of these Caesars,
that their mere countenance is said to have inspired
anguish. Tacitus, in the life of his father-in-law
Agricola, mentions the shuddering recollection of the

58 SENECA.

red face of Domitian, as it looked on at the games.
Seneca speaks in one place of wretches doomed to
undergo stones, sword, fire, and Cains ; in another he
says that he had tortured the noblest Romans with
everything which could possibly cause the intensest
agony, — with cords, plates, rack, fire, and, as though it
were the worst torture of all, with his look ! What
that look was, we learn from Seneca himself: '* His
face was ghastly pale, with a look of insanity ; his
fierce dull eyes were half hidden under a wrinkled
brow; his ill-shaped head was partly bald, partly
covered with dyed hair ; his neck covered with bristles,
hi's legs thin, and his feet mis-shapen." Woe to the
nation that lies under the heel of a brutal despotism ;
treble woe to the nation that can tolerate a despot
so brutal as this ! Yet this was the nation in the
midst of which Seneca lived, and this was the despot
under whom his early manhood was spent.

" But what more oft in nations grown corrupt.
And by their vices brought to servitude,
Than to love bondage more than liberty,
Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty?"

It was one oi the peculiarities of Caius Caesar that
he hated the very existence of any excellence. He
used to bully and insult the gods themselves, frown-
ing even at the statues of Apollo and Jupiter of
the Capitol. He thought of abolishing Homer, and
ordered the works of Livy and Virgil to be removed
from all libraries, because he could not bear that they
should be praised. He ordered Julius Gr^ecinus to be

THE REIGN OF CAWS. 69

put to death for no other reason than this, " that he
was a better man than it was expedient for a tyrant
that any one should be;" for, as PHny tells us,
the Caesars deliberately preferred that their people
should be vicious than that they should be virtuous.
It was hardly likely that such a man should view
with equanimity the rising splendour of Seneca's
reputation. Hitherto, the young man, who was
thirty-five years old at the accession of Caius, had
not written any of his philosophic works, but in
all probability he had published his early, and no
longer extant, treatises on earthquakes, on super-
stitions, and the books On India, and On the Man-
ners of Egypt, which had been the fruit of his
early travels. It is probable, too, that he had
recited in public some of those tragedies which have
come down to us under his name, and in the com-
position of which he was certainly concerned. All
these works, and especially the applause won by the
public reading of his poems, would have given him
that high literary reputation which we know him to
have earned. It was not, however, this reputation,
but the brilliancy and eloquence of his orations at the
bar which excited the jealous hatred of the Emperor.
Caius piqued himself on the possession of eloquence ;
and, strange to say, there are isolated expressions of
his which seem to show that, in lucid intervals, he was
by no means devoid of intellectual acuteness. For
instance, there is real humour and insight in the
nicknames of " a golden sheep " which he gave to
the rich and placid Silanus, and of " Ulysses in

^ti SENECA.

petticoats," by which he designated his grandmother,
the august Livia. The two epigrammatic criticisms
which he passed upon the style of Seneca are not
v*^holly devoid of truth ; he called his works Com-
missiones meras, or mere displays.* In this expression
he hit off, happily enough, the somewhat theatrical,
the slightly pedantic and pedagogic and professorial
character of Seneca's diction, its rhetorical ornament
and antithesis, and its deficiency in stern masculine
simplicity and strength. In another remark he showed
him.self a still more felicitous critic. He called
Seneca's writings Arena sine Cake, " sand without
lime," or, as we might say, "a rope of sand." This
epic^ram showed a real critical faculty. It exactly
hits oft" Seneca's short and disjointed sentences, con-
sisting as they often do of detached antitheses. It
accords with the amusing comparison of Malebranche,
that Seneca's composition, with its perpetual and
futile recurrences, calls up to him the image of a
dancer who ends where he begins.

But Caius did not confine himself to clever and
malignant criticism. On one occasion, when Seneca
was pleading in his presence, he was so jealous and
displeased at the brilliancy and power of the orator
that he marked him out for immediate execution.
Had Seneca died at this period he would probably
have been little known, and he might have left few
traces of his existence beyond a few tragedies of
uncertain authenticity, and possibly a passing notice
in the page of Dio or Tacitus. But destiny reserved

* Suet. Calig. liii.

THE REIGN OF CAWS. 71

him for a more splendid and more questionable career.
One of Caius's favourites whispered to the Emperor
that it was useless to extinguish a waning lamp ;
that the health of the orator was so feeble that a
natural death by the progress of his consumptive
tendencies would, in a very short time, remove him
out of the tyrant's way.

Throughout the remainder of the few years during
which the reign of Caius continued, Seneca, warned in
time, withdrew himself into complete obscurity, em-
ploying his enforced leisure in that unbroken industry
which stored his mind with such encyclopaedic wealth.
" None of my days," he says, in describing at a later
period the way in which he spent his time, *' is passed
in complete ease. I claim even a part of the night
for my studies. I do not find leisure for sleep, but I
succumb to it, and I keep my eyes at their work even
when they are wearied and drooping with watchful-
ness. I have retired, not only from men, but from
affairs, and especially from my own. I am doing
work for posterity ; I am writing out things v/hich
may prove of advantage to them. I am intrusting to
writing healthful admonitions — compositions, as it
were, of useful medicines."

But the days of Caius drew rapidly to an end. His
gross and unheard-of insults to Valerius Asiaticus
and Cassius Chaereas brought on him condign ven-
geance. It is an additional proof, if proof were
wanting, of the degradation of Imperial Rome, that
the deed of retribution was due, not to the people
whom he had taxed ; not to the soldiers, whole rogi-

)i

72 SENECA.

ments of whom he had threatened to decimate, not
to the knights, of whom scores had been put to death
by his orders ; not to the nobles, multitudes of whom
had been treated by him with conspicuous infamy ;
not even to the Senate, which illustrious body he had
on all occasions deliberately treated with contumely
and hatred, — but to the private revenge of an insulted
soldier. The weak thin voice of Cassius Chaereas,
tribune of the praetorian cohort, had marked him out
for the coarse and calumnious banter of the imperial
buffoon ; and he determined, to avenge himself, and
at the same time rid the world of a monster. He
engaged several accomplices in the conspiracy, which
was nearly frustrated by their want of resolution.
For four whole days they hesitated while, day after
day, Caius presided in person at the bloody games of
the amphitheatre. On the fifth day (Jan. 24, A.D. 41),
feeling unwell after one of his gluttonous suppers, he
was indisposed to return to the shows, but at last rose
to do so at the solicitation of his attendants. A
vaulted corridor led from the palace to the circus, and
in that corridor Caius met a body of noble Asiatic
boys, who were to dance a Pyrrhic dance and sing a
laudatory ode upon the stage. Caius wished them
at once to practise a rehearsal in his presence, but
their leader excused himself on the grounds of hoarse-
ness. At this moment Chaereas asked him for the
watchword of the night. He gave the watchword,
"Jupiter." "Receive him in his wrath!" exclaimed
Chsereas, striking him on the throat, while almost at
the same moment the blow of Sabirms cleft the tyrants

THE REIGN CF CAWS, 73

jaw, and brought him to his knee. He crouched
his limbs together to screen himself from further
blows, screaming aloud, " I live ! I live !" The bearers
of his litter rushed to his assistance, and fought with
their poles, but Caius fell, pierced with thirty wounds ;
and, leaving the body weltering in its blood, the con-
spirators rushed out of the palace, and took measures
to concert with the Senate a restoration of the old
Republic. On the very night after the murder the
consuls gave to Chaereas the long- forgotten watchword
of " Liberty." But this little gleam of hope proved
delusive to the last degree. It was believed that the
unquiet ghost of the murdered madman haunted the
palace, and long before it had been laid to rest by
the forms of decent sepulture, a new emperor of the
^reat Julian family was securely seated upon the
throne.

CHAPTER VI.

THE REIGN CF CLAUDIUS, AND THE BANISHMENT OF SENECA.

While the senators were deliberating, the soldiers
were acting. They felt a true, though degraded,
instinct that to restore the ancient forms of demo-
cratic freedom would be alike impossible and use-
less, and with them the only question lay between
the rival claimants for the vacant power. Strange
to say that, among these claimants, no one seems
ever to have thought of mentioning the prince who
became the actual successor.

There was living in the palace at this time a brother
d{ the great Germanicus, and consequently an uncle
of the late emperor, whose name was Claudius Caesar.
Weakened both in mind and body by the continuous
maladies of an orphaned infancy, kept under the cruel
tyranny of a barbarous slave, the unhappy youth had
lived in despised obscurity among the members of a
family who were utterly ashamed of him. His mother
Antonia called him a monstrosity, which Nature had
begun but never finished ; and it became a proverbial
expression with her, as is said to have been the case
with the mother of the great Wellington, to say of a

THE REIGN OF CLAUDIUS.

dull person, ** that he was a greater fool than her son
Claudius." His grandmother Livia rarely deigned to
address him except in the briefest and bitterest terms.
His sister Livilla execrated the mere notion of his
ever becoming emperor. Augu'Jtus, his grandfather
by adoption, took pains to keep him as much out of
sight as possible, as a wool-gathering* and discredit-
able member of the family, denied him all public
honours, and left him a most paltry legacy. Tiberius,
when looking out for a successor, deliberately passed
him over as a man of deficient intellect. Caius kept
him as a butt for his own slaps and blows, and
for the low buffoonery of his meanest jesters. If the
unhappy Claudius came late for dinner, he would find
every place occupied, and peer about disconsolately
amid insulting smiles. If, as was his usual custom,
he dropped asleep after a meal, he was pelted with
olives and date-stones, or rough stockings were drawn
over his hands that he micrht be seen rubbin^^ his face
with them when he was suddenly awaked.

This was the unhappy being who was now sum-
moned to support the falling weight of empire. While
rummaging the palace for plunder, a common soldier
had spied a pair of feet protruding from under the
curtains which shaded the sides of an upper corridor.
Seizing these feet, and inquiring who owned them, he
dragged out an uncouth, panic-stricken mortal, who
immediately prostrated himself at his knees and
begged hard for mercy. It was Claudius, who, scared

* He calls him fxfTfwpo^, which implies awkwardness and constant
absence of mind.

II 2

76 SENECA.

out of his wits by the tragedy which he had just
beheld, had thus tried to conceal himself until the
storm was passed. " Why, this is Germanicus !"* ex-
claimed the soldier, *' let's make him emperor." Half
joking and half in earnest, they hoisted him on their
shoulders — for terror had deprived him of the use of
his legs — and hurried him off to the camp of the Prae-
torians. Miserable and anxious he reached the camp,
an object of compassion to the crowd of passers-by,
who believed that he was being hurried off to exe-
cution. But the soldiers, who well knew their own
interests, accepted him with acclamations, the more
so as, by a fatal precedent, he promised them a largess
of more than 80/. apiece. The supple Agrippa (the
Herod of Acts xii.), seeing how the wind lay, offered
to plead his cause with the Senate, and succeeded
partly by arguments, partly by intimidation, and
partly by holding out the not unreasonable hopes of
a great improvement on the previous reign.

For although Claudius had been accused of gam-
bling and drunkenness, not only were no worse sins
laid to his charge, but he had successfully established
some claim to being considered a learned man. Had
fortune blessed him till death with a private station,
he might have been the Luclen Bonaparte of his
family — a studious prince, who preferred the charms
of literature to the turmoil of ambition. The anec-
dotes which have been recorded of him show that he
was something of an archaeologist, and something of

* The full name of Claudius was Tiberius Claudius Drusus Caesar
Germanicus.

THE REIGN OF CLA UDWS. 7*/

a philologlan. The great historian Livy, pitying the
neglect with which the poor young man was treated,
had encouraged him in the study of history; and he
had written memoirs of his own time, memoirs of
Augustus, and even a history of the civil wars since
the battle of Actium, which was so correct and so
candid that his family indignantly suppressed it as a
fresh proof of his stupidity.

Such was the man who, at the age of fifty, became
master of the civilized world. He offers some singular
points of resemblance to our own " most mighty and
dread sovereign," King James I. Both were learned,
and both were eminently unwise;* both of them
were authors, and both of them were pedants ; both
of them delegated their highest powers to worthless
favourites, and both of them enriched these favourites
with such foolish liberality that they remained poor
themselves. Both of them had been terrified into
constitutional cowardice by their involuntary presence
at deeds of blood. Both of them, though of naturally
good dispositions, were misled by selfishness into acts
of cruelty ; and both of them, though laborious in the
discharge of duty, succeeded only in rendering royalty
ridiculous. King James kept Sir Walter Raleigh in
prison, and Claudius drove Seneca into exile. The
parallel, so far as I am aware, has never been noticed,
but is susceptible of being drauui out into the minutest
particulars.

f

"Knowledge comes, but ^visdom lingers," says our own poet.
Hcraclitus had said the same thing more than two thousand years beiore
him, jioKvfiadiri ov bili<itTK(%.

78 SKNKCA.

One of his first acts was to recall his nieces, Julia
and Agrippina, from the exile into which their brother
had driven them ; and both these princesses were
destined to effect a powerful influence on the life of
our philosopher.

What part Seneca had taken during the few
troubled days after the murder of Caius we do not
know. Had he taken a leading part — had he been
one of those who, like Chsereas, opposed the election of
Claudius as being merely the substitution of an imbecile
for a lunatic, — or who, like Sabinus, refused to survive
the accession of another Csesar, — we should perhaps
have heard of it ; and we must therefore assume either
that he was still absent from Rome in the retirement
into which he had been driven by the jealousy of
Caius, or that he contented himself with quietly watch-
ing the course of events. It will be observed that
his biography is not like that of Cicero, with whose
life we are acquainted in most trifling details ; but
tha.t the curtain rises and falls on isolated scenes,
throwing into sudden brilliancy or into the deepest
shade long and important periods of his history. Nor
are his letters and other writings full of those political
and personal allusions which convert them into an
autobiography. They are, without exception, occupied
exclusively with philosophical questions, or else they
only refer to such personal reminiscences as may best
be converted into the text for some Stoical paradox
or moral declamation. It is, however, certain from
the sequel that Seneca must have seized the oppor-
tunity of Caius's death to em.erge from his politic

THE REIGN OF CLA UDIUS. 7<i

obscurity, and to occupy a conspicuous and brilliant
position in the imperial court.

It would have been well for his own happiness and
fame if he had adopted the wiser and manlier course
of acting up to the doctrines he professed. A court
at most periods is, as the poet says,

" A golden but a fatal circle,
Upon whose magic skirts a thousand devils
In crystal forms sit tempting Innocence,
And beckon early Virtue fmm its centre ; "

but the court of a Caius, of a Claudius, or of a Nero,
was indeed a place wherein few of the wise could
find a footing, and still fewer of the good. And all
that Seneca gained from his career of ambition was
to be suspected by the first of these Emperors,
banished by the second, and murdered by the third.

The first few acts of Claudius showed a sensible and
kindly disposition ; but it soon became fatally obvious
that the real powers of the government would be
wielded, not by the timid and absent-minded Emperor,
but by any one who for the time being could acquire
an ascendency over his well-intentioned but feeble
disposition. Now, the friends and confidants of
Claudius had long been chosen from the ranks of his
freedmen. As under Louis XI. and Don Miguel, the
bart)ers of these monarchs were the real governors, so
Claudius was but the minister rather than the master
of Narcissus his private secretary, of Polybius his
literary adviser, and of Pallas his accountant. A
third person, with whose name Scripture has made us
familiar, was a freedman of Claudius. This was Felix,

8o SENECA,

the brother of Pallas, and that Procurator who, though
he had been the husband or the paramour of three
queens, trembled before the simple eloquence of a
feeble and imprisoned Jew.* These men became
proverbial for their insolence and wealth ; and once,
when Claudius was complaining of his own poverty,
some one wittily replied, "that he would have abun-
dance if two of his freedmen would but admit him
into partnership with them."

But these men gained additional power from the
countenance and intrigues of the young and beautiful
wife of Claudius, Valeria Messalina. In hks marriage,
as in all else, Claudius had been pre-eminent in mis-
fortune. He lived in an age of which the most
frightful sign of depravity was that its women were, if
possible, a shade worse than its men ; and it was the
misery of Claudius, as it finally proved his ruin, to
have been united by marriage to the very worst
among them all. Princesses like the Berenice, and
the Drusilla, and the Salome, and the Herodias of
the sacred historians were in this age a familiar
spectacle ; but none of them were so wicked as two
at least of Claudius's wives. He was betrothed or
married no less than five times. The lady first
destined for his bride had been repudiated because
.her parents had offended Augustus ; the next died
on the very day intended for her nuptials. By his
first actual wife, Urgulania, whom he had married
in early youth, he had two children, Drusus and
Claudia ; Drusus was accidentally choked in boyhood

* Acts xix.

THE REIGN OF CLA UDIUS, 8i

while trying to swallow a pear which had been thrown
up into the air. Very shortly after the birth of
Claudia, discovering the unfaithfulness of Urgulania,
Claudius divorced her, and ordered the child to be
stripped naked and exposed to die. His second wife,
^lia Petina, seems to have been an unsuitable person,
and her also he divorced. His third and fourth wives
lived to earn a colossal infamy — Valeria Messalina for
her shameless character, Agrippina the younger for
her unscrupulous ambition.

Messalina, when she married, could scarcely have
been fifteen years old. yet she at once assumed a
dominant position, and secured it by means of the
most unblushing wickedness.

But she did not reign so absolutely undisturbed as
to be without her own jealo'jsies and apprehensions ;
and these were mainly kindled by Julia and Agrip-
pina, the two nieces of the Emperor. They were, no
less than herself, beautiful, brilliant, and evil-hearted
women, quite ready to make their own coteries, and
to dispute, as far as they dared, the supremacy of a
bold but reckless rival. They too, used their arts,
their wealth, their rank, their political influence, their
personal fascinations*, to secure for themselves a band
of adherents, ready, when the proper moment arrived,
for any conspiracy. It is unlikely that, even in the
first flush of her husband's strange and unexpected
triumph, Messalina should have contemplated with
any satisfaction their return from exile. In this
respect it is probable that the Emperor succeeded
in -resisting her expressed wishes; so that the mere

82 SENECA.

appearance of the two daughters of Germariicus in
her presence was a standing witness of the Hmitations
to which her influence was subjected.

At this period, as is usual among degraded peoples,
the history of the Romans degenerates into mere
anecdotes of their rulers. Happily, however, it is not
our duty to enter on the cJirouique scandaleuse of plots
and counterplots, as little tolerable to contemplate as
the factions of the court of France in the worst periods
of its history. We can only ask what possible part a
philosopher could play at such a court i We can
only say that his position tiiere is not to the credit
of his philosophical professions ; and that we can
contemplate his presence there with as little satisfac-
tion as we look on the figure of the worldly and
frivolous bishop in Mr. Frith 's picture of "The Last
Sunday of Charles 11. at Whitehall."

And such inconsistencies involve their own retribu-
tion, not only in loss of influence and fair fame, but
even in direct consequences. It was so with Seneca.
Circumstances — possibly a genuine detestation of
Messalina's exceptional infamy — seem to have thrown
him among the partisans of her rivals. Messalina
was only waiting her opportunity to strike a blow.
Julia, possibly as being the younger and the less
powerful of the two sisters, was marked out as the
first victim, and the opportunity seemed a favourable
one for involving Seneca in her ruin. His enormous
wealth, his high reputation, his splendid abilities, made
him a formidable opponent to the Empress, and a
valuable ally to her rivals. It was determined to ^^\

THE REIGN OF CLA UDIUS. S3

nd of both by a single scheme. JuHa was accused of
an intrigue with Seneca, and was first driven into
exile and then put to death. Seneca was banished to
the barren and pestilential shores of the island of
Corsica.

Seneca, as one of the most enlightened men of his
aee, should have aimed at a character which would
have been above the possibility of suspicion : but we
must remember that charges such as those which
were brought against him were the easiest of all to
make, and the most impossible to refute. When
we consider who were Seneca's accusers, we are
not forced to believe his guilt ; his character was
indeed deplorably weak, and the laxity of the age
in such matters was fearfully demoralising ; but
there are sufficient circumstances in his favour to
justify us in returning a verdict of " Not guilty."
Unless we attach an unfair importance to the bitter
calumny of his open enemies, we may consider that
the general tenor of his life has sufficient weight to
exculpate him from an unsupported accusation

Of Julia, Suetonius expressly says that the crime
of which she was accused was uncertain, and that
she was condemned unheard. Seneca, on the other
hand, was tried in the Senate and found guilty. He
tells us that it was not Claudius who flung him down,
but rather that, when he was falling headlong, the
Emperor supported him with the moderation of his
divine hand ; " he entreated the Senate on my behalf;
he. not only ^^z^^ me life, but even begged it for me.
Let it be his to consider," adds Seneca, with the
7 I

84 SENECA.

most dulcet flattery, " in what light he may wish
my cause to be regarded ; either his justice will find,
or his mercy will make, it a good cause. He will
alike be worthy of my gratitude, whether his ultimate
conviction of my innocence be due to his knowledge
or to his will."

This passage enables us to conjecture how matters
stood. The avarice of Messalina was so insatiable that
the non-confiscation of Seneca's immense wealth is a
proof that, for some reason, her fear or hatred of him
was not implacable. Although it is a remarkable fact
that she is barely mentioned, and never once abused, in
the writings of Seneca, yet there can be no doubt that
the charge was brought by her instigation before the
senators ; that after a very slight discussion, or none
at all, Claudius was, or pretended to be, convinced of
Seneca's culpability ; tiiat the senators, with their
usual abject servility, at once voted him guilty of-high
treason, and condemned him to death, and the con-
fiscation of his goods ; and that Claudius, perhaps
from his own respect for literature, perhaps at the
intercession of Agrippina, or of some powerful freed-
man, remitted part of his sentence, just as King
James 1. remitted all the severest portions of the
sentence passed on Francis Bacon.

Neither the belief of Claudius nor the condemna-
tion of the Senate furnish the slightest valid proofs
against him. The Senate at this time were so base
and so filled with terror, that on one occasion a mere
word of accusation from the freedman of an Emperor
was sufficient to make them fall upon one of their

THE REIGN OF CLAUDIUS. 8S

number, and stab him to death upon the spot with
their iron pens. As for poor Claudius, his adminis-
tration of justice, patient and laborious as it was,
had already grown into a public joke. On one
occasion he wrote down and delivered the wise
decision, " that he agreed with the side which had set
forth the truth." On another occasion, a common
Greek whose suit came before him grcAr so impatient
at his stupidity as to exclaim aloud, '* You are an old
fool." We are not informed that the Greek was
punished. Roman usage allowed a good deal of
banter and coarse personality. We are told that on
one occasion even the furious and bloody Caligula,
seeing a provincial smile, called him up, and asked
him what he was laughing at. "At you," said the
man; "you look such a humbug." The grim tyrant
was so struck with the humour of the thing that he
took no further notice of it. A Roman knight against
whom some foul charge had been trumped up, see-
ing Claudius listening to the most contemptible and
worthless evidence against him, indignantly abused him
for his cruel stupidity, and flung his pen and tablets in
his face so violently as to cut his cheek. In fact, the
Emperor's singular absence of mind gave rise to
endless anecdotes. Among other things, when some
condemned criminals were to fight as gladiators, and
addressed him before the games in the sublime
formula — "Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutamus !'*
("Hail, Caesar! doomed to die, we salute thee!") he
gave the singularly inappropriate answer, " Avete
vos!" (" Hail ye also !") which they took as a sign of

86 SENECA.

pardon, and were unwilling to fight until they were
actually forced to do so by the gestures of the
Emperor.

The decision of such judges as Claudius and his
Senate is worth very little in the question of a man's
innocence or guilt ; but the sentence was that Sen-
eca should be banished to the island of Corisca.

CHAPTER VII.

SENECA IN EXILE,

So, in A.D. 41, in the prime of life and the full vigour
of his faculties, with a name stained by a charge of
which he may have been innocent, but of which he
was condemned as guilty, Seneca bade farewell to
his noble-minded mother, to his loving aunt, to his
brothers, the beloved Gallio and the literary Mela,
to his nephew, the ardent and promising young
Lucan, and, above all — which cost him the severest
pang — to Marcus, his sweet and prattHng little boy.
It was a calamity which might have shaken the forti-
tude of the very noblest soul, and it had by no means
come upon him single-handed. Already he had lost
his wife, he had suffered from acute and chronic ill-
health, he had been bereavei' but three weeks pre-
viously of another little son. He had been cut short
by the jealousy of one emperor from a career of
splendid success ; he was now banished by the
imbecile subservience of another from all that he
held most dear.

We are hardly able to conceive the intensity of
anguish with which an ancient Poman generally

12

88 SENECA.

regarded the thought of banishment. In the long
melancholy wail of Ov^id's " Tristia ;" in the bitter
and heart-rending complaints of Cicero's " Epistles,"
we may see something of that intense absorption in
the life of Rome which to most of her eminent citizens
made a permanent separation from the city and its
interests a thought almost as terrible as death it-
self Even the stoical and heroic Thrasea openly
confessed that he should prefer death to exile.
To a heart so affectionate, to a disposition so social,
to a mind so active and ambitious as that of Seneca,
it must have been doubly bitter to exchange the
happiness of his family circle, the splendour of an
imperial court, the luxuries of enormous wealth, the
refined society of statesmen, and the ennobling
intercourse of philosophers for the savage wastes
of a rocky island and the society of boorish illiterate
islanders, or, at the best, of a 'lqw other political
exiles, ail of whom would be as miserable as him-
self, and some of whom would probably have deserved
their fate.

The Mediterranean rocks selected for political
exiles — Gyaros, Seriphos, Scyathos, Patmos, Pontia,
Pandataria — were generally rocky, barren, fever-
stricken places, chosen by design as the most
wretched conceivable spots in which human life
could be maintained at all. Yet these islands were
crowded with exiles, and in them were to be found
not a few princesses of Csesarean origin. We must
not draw a parallel to their position from that of
an Eleanor, the wife of Duke Humphrey, immured

SENECA IN EXILE. 8g

in Peel Castle in the Isle of Man, or of a Mai*y
Stuart in the Isle of Loch Leven, — for it was some-
thing incomparably worse. No care was taken even
to provide for their actual wants. Their very lives
were not secure. Agrippa Posthumus and Nero,
the brothers of the Emperor Caligula, had been so
reduced by starvation tnat botn of the wretched
youths had been drivi^n to support life by eating
the materials with which their beds were stuffed.
The Emperor Caius had once asked an exile,
whom he had recalled from banishment, in what
manner he had been accustomed to employ his time
on the island. " I used," said the flatterer, " to
pray that Tiberius might die, and that you might
succeed." It immediately struck Caius that the
exiles whom he had banished might be similarly
employed, and accordingly he sent centurions round
the islands to put them all to death. Such were the
miserable circumstances which might be in store for
a political outlaw. If we imagine what must have
been the feelings of a d'Espremenil, when a Icttre de
cachet consigned him to a prison in the Isle d'Hieres ;
or what a man like Burke might have felt, if he had
been compelled to retire for life to the Bermudas ; we
may realize to some extent the heavy trial which now
befel the life of Seneca.

Corsica was the island chosen for his place of

* Among the Jews the homicides who had fled to a city of refuge
were set free on the high priest's death, and, in order to preticnt them
from praying for his death, the mother and other relatives of the high
priest used to supply them with clothes and other necessaries. Sec the
a tlhoi's article or. " As}'lnm" in Kitto's Eucyelopadia ^ed. Alexander)

oo SENECA.

banishment, and a spot more uninviting could hardly
have been selected. It was an island " shaggy and
savage," intersected from north to south by a chain
of wild, inaccessible mountains, clothed to their sum-
mits with gloomy and impenetrable forests of pine
and fir. Its untamable inhabitants are described
by the geographer Strabo as being *' wilder than
the wild beasts." It produced but little corn, and
scarcely any fruit-trees. It abounded, indeed, in
swarms of wild bees, but its very honey was bitter
and unpalatable, from being infected with the acrid
taste of the box-flowers on which they fed. Neither
gold nor silver were found there j it produced noth-
ing worth exporting, and barely sufficient for the
mere necessaries of its inhabitants ; it rejoiced in no
great navigable rivers, and even the trees, in which it
abounded, were neither beautiful nor fruitful. Sene-
ca describes it in more than one of his epigrams, as a

" Terrible isle, when earliest summer glows
Yet fiercer when his face the dog-star shows ; "

and again as a

" Barbarous land, which rugged rocks surround,
Whose horrent cliffs with idle wastes are crowned,
No autumn fruit, no tilth the summer yields,
Nor olives cheer the winter-silvered fields :
Nor joyous spring her tender foliage lends,
Nor genial herb the luckless soil befriends ;
Nor bread, nor sacred fire, nor freshening' wave ; —
Nought here — save exile, and the exile's grave ! "

In such a place, and under such conditions, Seneca
had ample need for all hir^ philosophy. And at first

SENECA IN EXILE, 91

it did not fail him. Towards the close of his first
year of exile he wrote the " Consolation to his
mother Helvia," which is one of the noblest and
most charming of all his works.

He had often thought, he said, of writing to console
her under this deep and wholly unlooked-for trial,
but hitherto he had abstained from doing so, lest,
while his own anguish and hers were fresh, he should
only renew the pain of the wound by his unskilful
treatment. He waited therefore till time had laid its
healing hand upon her sorrows, especially because he
found no precedent for one in his position condoling
with others when he himself seemed more in need
of consolation, and because something new and
admirable would be required of a man who, as it were,
raised his head from the funeral pyre to console his
friends. Still he now feels impelled to write to her,
because to alleviate her regrets will be to lay aside
his own. He does not attempt to conceal from her
the magnitude of the misfortune, because, so far from
being a mere novice in sorrow, she has tasted it from
her earliest years in all its varieties ; and because his
purpose was to conquer her grief, not to extenuate
its causes. Those many miseries would indeed have
been in vain, if they had not taught her how to bear
wretchedness. He will prove to her therefore that
she has no cause to grieve either on his account, or on
her own. Not on his — because he is happy among
circumstances which others would ihink miserable
and because he assures her with his own lips that
not only is he not miserable, but that he can never

92 SENECA.

be made so. Every one can secure his own happiness,
if he learns to seek it, not in external circumstances,
but in himself. He cannot indeed claim for himself
the title of wise, for, if so, he would be the most
fortunate of men, and near to God Himself; but,
which is the next best thing, he has devoted himself
to the study of wise men, and from them he has
learnt to expect nothing and to be prepared for all
things. The blessings which Fortune had hitherto
bestowed on him, — -wealth, honours, glory, — he had
placed in such a position that she might rob him of
them all without disturbing him. There was a great
space between them and himself, so that they could
be take?i but not torn away. Undazzled by the
glamour of prosperity, he was unshaken by the blow
of adversity. In circumstances which were the envy
of all men he had never seen any real or solid bless-
ing, but rather a painted emptines.s, a gilded decep-
tion ; and similarly he found nothing really hard or
terrible in ills which the common voice has so
described.

What, for instance, was exile .-^ it was but a change
of place, an absence from one's native land ; and, if
you looked at the swarming multitudes in Rome
itself, you would find that the majority of them were
practically in contented and willing exile, drawn
thither by necessity, by ambition, or by the search for
the best opportunities of vice. No isle so wretched
and so bleak which did not attract some voluntary
sojourners ; even this precipitous and naked rock of
Corsica, the hungriest, roughest, most savage, most

SENECA IN EXILE. 93

unhealthy spot conceivable, had more foreigners in it
than native inhabitants. The natural restlessness
and mobility of the human mind, which arose from
its aetherlal origin, drove men to change from place
to place. The colonies of different nations, scattered
all over the civilized and uncivilized world even in
spots the most chilly and uninviting, show that the
condition of place is no necessary ingredient in human
happiness. Even Corsica had often changed its
owners ; Greeks from IMarseilles had first lived
there, then Ligurians and Spaniards, then some
Roman colonists, whom the aridity and thorniness
of the rock had not kept away.

" Varro thought that nature, Brutus that the con-
sciousness of virtue, v/ere sufficient consolations for
any exile. How little have I lost in comparison with
those two fairest possessions which I shall everywhere
enjoy — nature and my own integrity ! Whoever or
whatever made the world — whether it were a deity,
or disembodied reason, or a divine interfusing spirit,,
or destiny, or an immutable series of connected causes
— the result was that nothing, except our very meanest
possessions, should depend on the will of another.
Man's best gifts lie beyond the power of man either
to give or to take away. This Universe, the grandest
and loveliest work of nature, and the Intellect which
was created to observe and to admire it, are our
special and eternal possessions, which shall last as
long as we last ourselves. Cheerful, therefore, and
erect, let us hasten with undaunted footsteps whither-
soever our fortunes lead us.

94 SENECA.

" There is no land where man cannot dwell, — no
land where he cannot uplift his eyes to heaven ,
wherever we are, the distance of the divine from the
human remains the same. So then, as long as my
eyes are not robbed of that spectacle with which they
cannot be satiated, so long as I may look upon the
sun and moon, and fix my lingering gaze on the other
constellations, and consider their rising and setting
and the spaces between them and the causes of their
less and greater speed, — while I may contemplate the
multitude of stars glittering throughout the heaven,
some stationary, some revolving, some suddenly
blazing forth, others dazzling the gaze with a flood of
fire as though they fell, and others leaving over a long
space their trails of light ; while I am in the midst of
such phenomena, and mingle myself, as far as a man
may, with things celestial, — while my soul is ever
occupied in contemplations so sublime as these,
what matters it what ground I tread ?

" What though fortune has thrown me where the
most magnificent abode is but a cottage ? the humblest
cottage, if it be but the home of virtue, may be more
beautiful than all temples ; no place is narrow which
can contain the crowd of glorious virtues ; no exile
severe into which you may go with such a reliance.
When Brutus left Marcellus at Mitylene, he seemed
to be himself going into exile because he left that
illustrious exile behind him. Caesar would not land
at Mitylene, because he blushed to see him. Marcellus
therefore, though he was living in exile and poverty,
was living a most happy and a most noble life.

SENECA IN EXILE. 95

" 'One self approving hour whole worlds outweighs
Of stupid starers and of loud huzzas ;
And more true joy Marcellus exiled feels,
Than Caesar with a senate at his heels.'

" And as for poverty, every one who is not cor-
rupted by the madness of avarice and luxury knows
that it is no evil. How little does man need, and how
easily can he secure that ! As for me, I consider my-
self as having lost not wealth, but the trouble of look-
ing after it. Bodily wants are few — warmth and food,
nothing more. May the gods and goddesses confound
that gluttony which sweeps the sky, and sea, and land
for birds, and animals, and fish ; which eats to vomit
and vomits to eat, and hunts over the whole world for
that which after all it cannot even digest ! They
might satisfy their hunger with little, and they excite
it with much. What harm can poverty inflict on a
man who despises such excesses .'* Look at the god-
like and heroic poverty of our ancestors, and compare
the simple glory of a Camillus with the lasting infamy
of a luxurious Apicius ! Even exile will yield a
sufficiency of necessaries, but not even kingdoms are
enough for superfluities. It is the soul that makes us
rich or poor : and the soul follows us into exile, and
finds and enjoys its own bles.sings even in the most
barren solitudes.

" But it does not even need philosophy to enable us
to despise poverty. Look at the poor : are they not
often ©bviously happier than the rich .? And the times
are so changed that what we would now consider the
poverty of an exile would then have been regarded as

K

0 SENECA.

the patrimony of a prince. Protected by such prece-
dents as those of Homer, and Zeno, and Menenius
Agrippa, and Regulus, and Scipio, poverty becomes
not only safe but even estimable.

" And if you make the objection that the ills which
assail me are not exile only, or poverty only, but dis-
grace as well, I reply that the soul which is hardy
enough to resist one wound is invulnerable to all. It
we have utterly conquered the fear of death, nothing
else can daunt us. What is disgrace to one who
stands above the opinion of the multitude ? what Avas
even a death of disgrace to Socrates, who by entering
a prison miade it cease to be disgraceful 1 Cato was
twice defeated in his candidature for the praetorship
and consulship : well, this was the disgrace of those
honours, and not of Cato. No one ca7i be despised by
another until he has learnt to despise himself. The
man who has learnt to triumph over sorrow wears his
miseries as though they were sacred fillets upon his
brov/, and nothing is so entirely admirable as a man
bravely wretched. Such men inflict disgrace upon dis-
grace itself Some indeed say that death is preferable
to contempt ; to whom I reply that he who is great
when he falls is great in his prostration, and is no
more an object of contempt than when men tread on
the ruins of sacred buildings, which men of piety
venerate no less than if they stood.

" On my behalf therefore, dearest mother, you have
no cause for endless weeping : nor have you on your
ov/n. You cannot grieve for me on selfish grounds,
la consequence of any personal loss to yourself; for

SENECA IN EXILE. 97

you were ever eminently unselfish, and unlike other
women in all your dealings with your sons, and you
were always a help and a benefactor to them rather
than they to you. Nor should you give way out of a
regret and longing for me in my absence. We have
often previously been separated, and, although it is
natural that you should miss that delightful conversa-
tion, that unrestricted confidence, that electrical sym-
pathy of heart and intellect that always existed
between us, and that boyish glee wherewith your
visits always affected me, yet, as you rise above the
common herd of women in the virtue, the simplicity,
the purity of your life, you must abstain from feminine
tears as you have done from all feminine follies.
Consider how Cornelia, who had lost ten children by
death, instead of wailing for her dead sons, thanked
fortune that had made her sons GraccJii. Rutilia
followed her son Cotta into exile, so dearly did she
love him, yet no one saw her shed a tear after his
burial. She had shown her affection when it was
needful, she restrained her sorrow when it was super-
fluous. Imitate the example of these great women
as you have imitated their virtues. I want you not
to beguile your sorrow by amusements or occupa-
tions, but to conquer it. For you may now return to
tliose philosophical studies in which you once showed
yourself so apt a proficient, and which formerly my
father checked. They will gradually sustain and
comfort you in your hour of grief.

*' And meanwhile consider how many sources of
consolation already exist for you. My brothers are

98 SENECA.

still with you ; the dignity of Gallic, the leisure of
Mela, will protect you ; the ever-sparkling mirth of
my darling little Marcus will cheer you up ; the train-
ing of my little favourite Novatilla will be a duty
which will assuage your, sorrow. For your father's
sake, too, though he is absent from you, you must
moderate your lamentations. Above all, your sister
— that truly faithful, loving, and high-souled lady, to
whom I owe so deep a debt of affection for her kind-
ness to me from my cradle until now, — she will yield
you the fondest sympathy and the truest consolation.
" But since I know that after all your thoughts will
constantly revert to me, and that none of your chil-
dren will be more frequently before your mind than
I, — not because they are less dear to you than I, but
because it is natural to lay the hand most often upon
the spot which pains, — I will tell you how you are to
think of me. Think of me as happy and cheerful,
as though I were in the midst of blessings ; as indeed
I am, while my mind, free from every care, has leisure
for its own pursuits, and sometimes amuses itself
with lighter studies, sometimes, eager for truth, soars
upwards to the contemplation of its own nature, and
the nature of the universe. It inquires first of all
about the lands and their situation ; then into the
condition of the surrounding sea, its ebbings and
flowings ; then it carefully studies all this terror-
fraught interspace between heaven and earth, tumul-
tuous with thunders and lightnings, and the blasts of
winds, and the showers of rain, and snow, and hail ;
then, having wandered through all the lower regions,

SENECA IN EXILE. ry)

it bursts upwards to the highest things, and revels in
the most lovely spectacle of that which is divine, and,
mindful of its own eternity, passes into all that hath
been and all that shall be throughout all ages."

Such, in briefest outline, and without any of thai
grace of language with which Seneca has invested
it, IS a sketch of the little treatise which many have
regarded as among the most delightful of Seneca's
works. It presents the picture of that grandest of
all spectacles —

" A good man sti-ugglmg with the storms of fate."

So far there was something truly Stoical in the
aspect of Seneca's exile. But was this grand attitude
consistently maintained .<* Did his little raft of philo-
sophy sink under him, or did it bear him safely over
the stormy waves of this great sea of adversity ?

8 K

CHAPTER VIII.

SENECA'S PHILOSOPHY GIVES WAY.

There are some misfortunes of which the very
essence consists in their continuance. They are tole-
rable so loiifjas they are illuminated by a ray of hope.
Seclusion and hardship might even come at first with
some charm of novelty to a philosopher who, as
was not unfrequent among the amateur thinkers of
his time, occasionally practised them in the very
midst of wealth and friends. But as the hopeless
years rolled on, as the efforts of friends proved un-
availing, as the loving son, and husband, and father
felt himself cut off from the society of those whom he
cherished in such tender affection, as the dreary
island seemed to him ever more barbarous and
more barren, while season after season added to its
horrors without revealing a single compensation,
Seneca grew more and more disconsolate and de-
pressed. It seemed to be his miserable destiny to rust
away, useless, unbefriended, and forgotten. Formed
to fascinate society, here there were none for him to
fascinate ; gifted with an eloquence which could keep
lisrening senates hushed, here he found neither

SENLCA'S PHILOSOPHY GIVES IVAY. loi

subject nor audience * and bis life began to resemble
a river which, long before it has reached the sea, is
lost in dreary marshes and choking sands.

Like the brilliant Ovid, when he was banished to
the frozen wilds of Tomi, Seneca vented his anguish
in plaintive wailing and bitter verse. In his handful
of epigrams he finds nothing too severe for the place
of his exile. He cries —

" Spare thou thine exiles, lightly o'er thy dead,
Alive, yet buried, be thy dust bespread."

And addressing some malignant enemy —

" Whoe'er thou art, — thy name shall I repeat? —
Who o'er mine ashes dar'st to press thy feet,
And, -uncontented with a fall so dread,
Draw'st bloodstained weapons on my darkened head.
Beware ! for nature, pitying, guards the tcuib..
And ghosts avenge th' invaders cf tlierr .-rlcoii.
Hear, Envy, hear the gods proclaim a truth,
Which my shrill ghost repeats to move thy ruth.
Wretches are sacred things, — thy hands refrain .
E'en sacrilegious hands from tombs abstain."

The one fact that seems to have haunted him most
was that his abode in Corsica was a living death.

But the most complete picture of his state of mind,
and the most melancholy memorial of his inconsis-
tency as a philosopher, is to be found in his " Con-
solation to Polybius." Polybius was one of those
freedmen of the Emperor whose bloated wealth and
servile insolence were one of the darkest and strangest
phenomena of the time. Claudius, more than any of
his class, from the peculiar imbecility of his character,
was under the powerful influence of this class of men ;
and so dangerous was their power that Messalina

102 SEMECA.

herself was forced to win her ascendency over her
husband's mind by making these men her supporters,
and cultivating their favour. Such were ''the most
excellent Felix," the judge of St. Paul, and the slave
who became a husband to three queens, — Narcissus,
in whose household (which moved the envy of the
Emperor) were some of those Christians to whom
St. Paul sends greetings from the Christians of Corinth,"*
—Pallas, who never deigned to speak to his own slaves,
but gave all his comn/ands by signs, and who actually
condescended to receive the thanks of the Senate,
because he, the descendant of Etruscan kings, yet
condescended to serve the Emperor and the Common-
wealth ; a preposterous and outrageous compliment,
which appears to have been solely due to the fact of
his name being identical with that of Virgil's young
hero, the son of the mythic Evander !

Among this unworthy crew a certain Polybius was
not the least conspicuous. He was the director of
the E^mperor's studies, — a worthy Alcuin to such a
Charlemagne. All that we know about him is that
he was once the favourite of Messalina, and after-
wards her victim, and that in the day of his eminence
the favour of the Emperor placed him so high that
he was often seen walking between the two consuls.
Such was the man to whom, on the occasion of his
brother's death, Seneca addressed this treatise of con-
solation. It has couie down to us as a fragment,
and it would have been well for Seneca's fame if
it riad not come down to us at all. Those who are

* Rom. xvi. I J.

SENECA'S PHILOSOPHY GIVES WAY. 103

enthusiasts for his reputation would gladly prove it
spurious, but we believe that no candid reader can
scudy it without perceiving its genuineness. It is
very improbable that he ever intended it to be pub-
lished, and whoever suffered it to see the light was
the successful enemy of its ilkistrious author.

Its sad and abject tone confirms the inference,
drawn from an allusion which it contains, that it was
vvritten towards the close of the third year of Seneca's
exile. He apologises for its style by saying that if it
betrayed any weakness of thought or inelegance of
expression this was only what might be expected from
a man who had so long been surrounded by the coarse
and offensive patois of barbarians. We need hardly
follow him into the ordinary topics of moral philosophy
with which it abounds, or expose the inconsistency of
its tone with that of Seneca's other writings. He
consoles the freedman with the "comimon common-
places" that death is inevitable; that grief is useless;
that we are all born to sorrow ; that the dead would
not wish us to be miserable for their sakes. He reminds
him that, owing to his illustrious position, all eyes are
upon him. He bids him find consolation in the
studies in which he has always shown himself so pre-
eminent, and lastly he refers him to those shining
examples of magnanimous fortitude, for the climax of
which, no doubt, the whole piece of interested flattery
was composed. For this passage, written in a crescendo
style, culminates, as might have been expected, in the
sublime spectacle of Claudius Caesar. So far from
resenting his exile, he crawls in the dust to kiss

I04 SENECA.

Caesar's beneficent feet for saving him from death ;
so far from asserting his innocence — which, perhaps,
was impossible, since to do so might have involved
him in a fresh charge of treason ---he talks with all
the abjectness of guilt. He belauds the clemency of
a man, w^ho, he tells us elsewhere, used to kill men
with as much sang fToid as a 6,0^^ eats offal ; the pro-
digious powers of memory of a divine creature who
used to ask people to dice and to dinn&r whom he had
executed the day before, and who even inquired as
to the cause of his wifes absence a few days after
having given the order for her execution ; the extra-
ordinary eloquence of an indistinct stutterer, whose
head shook and wliose bioad hps seemed to be in
contortions whenever he spoke.* If Polybius feels
sorrowful, let him turn his eyes to Caesar ; the
splendour of that most great and radiant deity will
so dazzle his eyes that all their tears will be dried up
in the admiring gaze. Oh that the bright occidental
star vdiich has beamed on a world which, before its
rising, was plunged in darkness and deluge, would
only shed one little beam upon him !

No doubt these grotesque and gorgeous flatteries,
contrasting strangely with the bitter language of
intense hatred and scathiiig contempt which Seneca
poured out on the memory of Claudius after his
dnath, were penned with the sole purpose of being
repeated in those divine and benignant ears. No
doubt the superb freedman, who had been allowed

* These slight discrepancies of description are taken from co-ttntet
p^Mages of Coiisol. ad Folyb. and the Liidus de liiorte CcesarU.

SENECA'S PHILOSOPHY GIVES WA Y. 105

so rich a share of the flatteries lavished on his master,
would take the opportunity — if not out of good-nature,
at least out of vanity,— to retail them in the imperial
ear. If the moment were but favourable, who knows
but what at some oblivious and crapulous moment
the Emperor might be induced to sign an order for
our philosopher's recall ?

Let us not be hard on him. Exile and wretchedness
are stern trials, and it is difficult for him to brave a
martyr's misery who has no conception of a martyr's
crown. To a man who, like Seneca, aimed at being
not only a philosopher, but also a man of the world —
who in this very treatise criticises the Stoics for their
ignorance of life — there would not have seemed to be
even the shadow of disgrace in a priv^ate effusion of
insincere flattery intended to win the remission of a
deplorable banishment. Or, if we condemn Seneca,
let us remember that Christians, no less than philo-
sophers, have attained a higher eminence only to ex-
emplify a more disastrous fall. The flatteries of Seneca
to Claudius are not more fulsome, and are infinitely
less disgraceful, than those which fawning bishops
exuded on his counterpart. King James. And if the
Roman Stoic can gain nothing from a comparison with
the yet more egregious mordfl failure of the greatest
of Christian thinkers — Francis Bacon, Viscount St.
Alban's — let us not forget that a Savonarola and a
Cranmer recanted under torment, and that the anguish
of exile drew even from the starry and imperial spirit
of Dante Alighieri words and sentiments' for which
in his noblesi". moments he might have blushed.

CHAPTER IX.

senega's recall from exile.

Of the last five years of Seneta's weary exile no
trace has been preserved to us. What were his
alternations of hope and fear, of devotion to philo-
sophy and of hankering after the world which he
had lost, we cannot tell. Any hopes which he may
have entertained respecting the intervention of Poly-
bius in his favour must have been utterly quenched
when he heard that the freed man, though formerly
powerful with Messalina, had forfeited his own life
m consequence of her machinations. But the closing
period of his days in Corsica must have brought him
thrilling news, which would save him from falling into
absolute despair.

For the career of Messalina was drawing rapidly
to a close. The life of this beautiful princess, short
as it was, for she died at a very early age, was
enough to make her name a proverb of everlasting
infamy. For a time she appeared irresistible. Her
personal fascination had won for her an unlimited
sway over the facile mind of Claudius, and she havd
either won over by her intrigues, or terrified by her

SENECA'S RECALL FROM EXILE. 107

pitiless severity, the noblest of the Romans and the
most powerful of the freedmen. But we sec in her
fate, as we see on every page of history, that vice
ever carries with it the germ of its own ruin, and
that a retribution, which is all the more inevitable
from being often slow, awaits every violation of the
moral law.

There is something almost incredible in the penal
infatuation which brought about her fall. During
the absence of her husband at Ostia, she wedded
in open day with C. Silius, the most beautiful and
the most promising of the young Roman nobles.
She had apparently persuaded Claudius that this was
merely a mock-marriage, intended to avert some
ominous auguries which threatened to destroy "the
husband of Messalina;" but, whatever Claudius may
have imagined, all the rest of the world knew the
marriage to be real, and regarded it not only as a
vile enormity, but also as a direct attempt to bring
about a usurpation of the imperial power.

It was by this view of the case that the freedman
Narcissus roused the inert spirit and timid indig-
nation of the injured Emperor. While the wild
revelry of the wedding ceremony was at its height,
Vettius Valens, a well-known physician of the da}-,
had in the licence of the festival struggled up to
the top of a lofty tree, and when they asked him
what he saw, he replied in words which, though
meant for jest, were full of dreadful significance, " I
see a fierce storm approaching from Ostia." He had
scarcely uttered the words when first an uncertain

io« SENECA.

rumour, and then numerous messengers brought the
news that Claudius knew all, and was coming to take
vengeance. The news fell like a thunderbolt on the
assembled guests. SiHus, as though nothing had hap-
pened, went to transact his pubhc duties in the Forum ;
Messalina instantly sending for her children, Octavia
and Britannicus, that she might meet her husband
with them by her side, implored the protection of
Vibidia, the eldest of the chaste virgins of Vesta, and,
deserted by all but three companions, fled on foot
and unpitied, through the whole breadth of the city,
until she reached the Ostian eate, and mounted the
rubbish-cart of a market gardener which happened
to be passing. But Narcissus absorbed both the looks
and the attention of the Emperor by the proofs and
the narrative of her crimes, and, getting rid of the
Vestal by promising her that the cause of Messalma
should be tried, he hurried Claudius forward, first to
the house of Silius, which abounded with the proofs
of his guilt, and then to the camp of the Praetorians,
where swift vengeance was taken on the whole band
of those who had been involved in Messalina's crimes.
She meanwhile, in alternative paroxysms of fury and
of abject terror, had taken refuge in the garden of
Lucullus, which she had coveted and made her own
by injustice. Claudius, who had returned home, and
had recovered some of his facile equanimity in the
pleasures of the table, showed signs of relenting ; but
Narcissus knew that delay was death, and on his own
authority sent a tribune and centurions to despatch
the Empress. They found her prostrate on tlit;

SENECA'S RECALL FROM EXILE. 109

ground at the feet of her mother Lepida, with whom
in her prosperity she had quarrelled, but who now
came to pity and console her misery, and to urge her
to that voluntary death which alone could save her
from imminent and more cruel infamy. But the
mind of Messalina, like that of Nero afterwards, was
so corrupted by wickedness that not even such poor
nobility was left in her as is implied in the courage
of despair. While she ^vasted the time in tears and
lamentations, a noise was heard of battering at the
doors, and the tribune stood by her in stern silence,
the freedman with slavish vituperation. First she
took the dagger in her irresolute hand, and after she
had twice stabbed herself in vain, the tribune drove
home the fatal blow, and the corpse of Messalina,
like that of Jezebel, lay weltering in its blood in the
plot of ground of which her crimes had robbed its
lawful owner. Claudius, still lingering at his dinner,
was informed that she had perished, and neither
asked a single question at the time, nor subsequently
displayed the slightest sign of anger, of hatred, of
pity, or of any human emotion.

The absolute silence of Seneca respecting . the
woman who had caused him the bitterest anguish and
humiliation of his life is, as we have remarked
already, a strange and significant phenomenon. It
is clearly not due to accident, for the vices which he
is incessantly describing and denouncing would have
found in this miserable woman their most flagrant
illustration, nor could contemporary history have
furnished a more apposite example of the vindication

no SENECA,

by her fate of the stern majesty of the moral law. But
yet, though Seneca had every reason to loathe her
character and to detest her memory, though he could
not have rendered to his p,atrons a more welcome
service than by blackening her reputation, he never
so much as mentions her name. And this honourable
silence giv^es us afavourable insight into his character.
For it can only be due to his pitying sense of the
fact that even Messalina, bad as she undoubtedly was,
had been judged already by a higher Power, and had
met her dread punishment at the hand of God. It has
been conjectured, with every appearance of proba-
bility, that the blackest of the scandals which were be-
lieved and circulated- respecting her had their origin
in the published autobiography of her deadly enemy
and victorious successor. The many who had had
a share in Messalina's fall would be only too glad to
poison every reminiscence of her life ; and the deadly
implacable hatred of the worst woman who ever lived
would find peculiar gratification in scattering every
conceivable hue of disgrace over the acts of a rival
whose young children it was her dearest object to
supplant. That Seneca did not deign to chronicle
even of an enemy what Agrippina was not ashamed
to write, — that he spared one whom it was every one's
interest and pleasure to malign, — that he regarded her
terrible fall as a sufficient claim to pity, as it was a
sufficient Nemesis upon her crimes, — is a trait in
the character of the philosopher which has hardly yet
received the credit which it deserves.

CHAPTER X.

AGRIPPINA, THE MOTHER OF NERO.

Scarcely had the grave closed over Messalina when
the court was plunged into the most violent factions
about the appointment of her successor. There were
three principal candidates for the honour of the aged
Emperor's hand. They were his former wife, .^lia
Petina, who had only been divorced in consequence
of trivial disagreements, and who was supported by
Narcissus ; Lollia Paulina, so celebrated in. antiquity
for her beauty and splendour, and who for a short
time had been the wife of Caius ; and Agrippina the
younger, the daughter of the great Germanicus, and
the niece of Claudius himself Claudius, indeed, who
had been as unlucky as Henry VHI. himself in the
unhappiness which had attended his five experiments
of matrimony, had made the strongest possible
asseverations that he would never again submit
himself to such a yoke. But he was so com-
pletely a tool in the hands of his own courtiers
that no one attached the slightest importance to
anything which he had said.

The marriage of an uncle with iiis own niece was

l2

112 SENECA.

considered a violation of natural laws, and was re-
garded with no less horror among the Romans than
it would be among ourselves. But Agrippina, by
the use of means the most unscrupulous, prevailed
over all her rivals, and managed her interests with
such consummate skill that, before many months had
elapsed, she had become the spouse of Claudius and
the Empress of Rome.

With this princess the destinies of Seneca were
most closely intertwined, and it w^ill enable us the
better to understand his position, and his writings,
if we remember that all history discloses to us no
phenomenon more portentous and terrible than that
presented to us in the character of Agrippina, the
mother of Nero.

Of the virtues of her great parents she, like their
other children, had inherited not one ; and she had
exaggerated their family tendencies into passions
which urged her into every form of crime. Her
career from the very cradle had been a career of
wickedness, nor had any one of the many fierce
vicissitudes .of her life called forth in her a single
noble or amiable trait. Born at Oppidum Ubiorum
(afterwards called in her honour Colonia Agrippina,
and still retaining its name in the form Cologne),
she lost her father at the age of three, and her
mother (by banishment) at the age of twelve. She
was educated with bad sisters, with a wild and
wicked brother, and under a grandmother whom she
detested. At the age of fourteen she was married
to Cnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, one of the most

AGRIPPTNA, THE MOTHER OF NERO. 113

worthless and ill-reputed of the young Roman nobles
of his day. The gossiping biographies of the time
still retain some anecdotes of his cruelty and selfish-
ness. They tell us how he once, without the sligh:est
remorse, ran over a poor boy who was playing on
the Appian Road ; how on another occasion he
knocked out the eye of a Roman knight who had
given him a hasty answer ; and how, when his friend
congratulated him on the birth of his son (the young
Claudius Domitius, afterwards the Emperor Nero),
he brutally remarked that from people like himself
and Agrippina could only be born some monster
destined for the public ruin.

Domitius was forty years old when he married
Agrippina, and the young Nero was not born till
nine years afterwards. Whatever there was of pos-
sible affection in the tigress-nature of Agrippina was
now absorbed in the person of her child. For that
child, from its cradle to her ovvn death by his means,
she toiled and sinned. The fury of her own ambi-
tion, inextricably linked with the uncontrollable
fierceness of her love for this only son, henceforth
directed every action of her life. Destiny had made
iier the sister of one Emperpr ; intrigue elevated
iier into the wife of another ; her own crimes made
her the mother of a third. And at first sight her
career might have seemed unusually successful, foi
while still in the prime of life she was wielding, first
in the name of her husband, and then in that of her
son, no mean share in the absolute government of
the Roman world. But mcanwiiile that same uncr-

114 SENECA.

ring retribution, whose stealthy footsteps in the rear
o^ the triumphant criminal we can track through page
after page of history, was stealing nearer and nearer
to her with uplifted hand. When she had reached
the dizzy pinnacle of gratified love and pride to which
she had waded through so many a deed of sin and
blood, she was struck down into terrible ruin and
violent shameful death, by the hand of that very son
for whose sake she had so often violated the laws of
virtue and integrity, and spurned so often the pure
and tender obligations which even the heathen had
been taught by the voice of God within their con-
science to recognise and to adore.

Intending that her son should marry Octavik, the
daughter of Claudius, her first step was to drive to
death Silanus, a young nobleman to whom Octavia
had already been betrothed. Her next care was to
get rid of all rivals possible or actual. Among the
former were the beautiful Calpurnia and her own
sister-in-law, Domitia Lepida. Among the latter
was the wealthy Lollia Paulina, against whom she
trumped up an accusation of sorcery and treason,
upon which her wealth was confiscated, but her life
spared by the Emperor, who banished her from Italy.
This half-vengeance was not enough for the mother
of Nero. Like the daughter of Herodias in sacred
history, she despatched a tribune with orders to
bring her the head of her enemy ; and when it was
brought to her, and she found a difficulty in recognising
those withered and ghastly features of a once-cele-
orated beauty, she is said with her own hand to have

AGRIPPINA, THE MOTHER OF AERO. 115

lifted one of the lips, and to have satisfied herself that
this was indeed the head of Lollia. To such horrors
may a woman sink, when she has abandoned the love
of God ; and a fair face may hide a soul " leprous
as sin itself." Well may Adolf Stahr observe that
Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth and husband-murdering
Gertrude are mere children by the side of this awful
giant-shape of steely feminine cruelty.

Such was the princess who, in the year A.D. 49,
recalled Seneca from exile.* She saw that her
cruelties were inspiring horror even into a city that had
long been accustomed to blood, and Tacitus expressly
tells us that she hoped to counterbalance this feeling
by a stroke of popularity in recalling from the waste
solitudes of Corsica the favourite philosopher and
most popular author of the Roman world. Nor was
she content with this public proof of her belief in
his innocence of the crime which had been laid to
his charge, for she further procured for him the
Praetorship, and appointed him tutor and governor
to her youthful son. Even in taking this step she
did not forget her ambitious views ; for she knew
that Seneca cherished a secret indignation against
Claudius, and that Nero could have no more wise
adviser in taking steps to secure the fruition of his
imperial hopes. It might perhaps have been better for
Seneca's happiness if he had never left Corsica, or set
his foot again in that Circean and bloodstained court.

* Gallio was Proconsul of Achaia about A. D, 53, when St. Paul was
brought before his tribunal. Very possibly his clc vation may have been
due to the restoration of Seneca's influence.
9

ir6 SENECA.

Let it, however, be added in his exculpation, that
another man of undoubted and scrupulous honesty, —
Afranius Burrus — a man of the old, blunt, faithful
type of Roman manliness, ■ whom Agrippina had
raised to the Prefectship of the Prsetorian cohorts,
was willing to share his danger and his respon-
sibilities. Yet he must have lived from the first in
the very atmosphere of base and criminal intrigues.
He must have formed an important member of
Agrippina's party, which was in daily and deadly
enmity against the party of Narcissus. He must
have watched the incessant artifices by which Agrip-
pina secured the adoption of her son Nero by an
Emperor whose own son Britannicus was but three
years his junior. He must have seen Nero always
honoured, promoted, paraded before the eyes of the
populace as the future hope of Rome, whilst Britan-
nicus, like the young Edward V. under the regency
of his uncle, was neglected, surrounded with spies,
kept as much as possible out of his father's sight,
and so completely thrust into the background from
all observation that the populace began seriously to
doubt whether he were alive or dead. He must have
seen Agrippina, who had now received the unprece-
dented honour of the title *' Augusta" in her lifetime,
a~ting with such haughty insolence that there could
be little doubt as to her ulterior designs upon the
throne. He must have known that his splendid
intellect was practically at the service of a woman
in whom avarice, haughtiness, violence, treachery,
and every form of unscrupulous criminality had

AGRIPPINA, THE MOTHER OF NERO. 117

reached a point hitherto unmatched even in a corrupt
and pagan world. From this time forth the biography
of Seneca must assume the form of an apology
rather than of a panegyric.

The Emperor could not but feel that in Agrippina
he had chosen a wife even more intolerable than
Messalina herself. Messalina had not interfered
with the friends he loved, had not robbed him
of the insignia of empire, had not filled his palace
with a hard and unfeminine tyranny, and had of
course watched with a mother's interest over tne
lives and fortunes of his children. Narcissus would
not be likely to leave him long in ignorance that, in
addition to her other plots and crimes, Agrippina had
been as little true to him as his former unhappy wife.
The information sank deep into his heart, and he was
heard to mutter that it had been his destiny all
along first to bear, and then to avenge, the enormities
of his wives. Agrippina, whose spies filled the palace,
could not long remain uninformed of so significant a
speech ; and she probably saw with an instinct
quickened by the awful terrors of her own guilty
conscience that the Emperor showed distinct signs
of his regret for having married his niece, and
adopted her child to the prejudice, if not to the ruin,
of his own young son. If she wanted to reach the
goal which she had held so long in view no time was
to be lost. Let us hope that Seneca and Ikirrus
were at least ignorant of the means which she took
to effect her purpose.

Fortune favoured her. The dreaded Narcissus, the
most formidable obstacle to her murderous plans, was

Ii8 SENECA.

sriyed with an attack of the gout. Agrippina managed
that his physician should recommend him the waters
of Sinuessa in C'lmpania by way of cure. He was
thus got out of the way, and she proceeded at once
to her work of blood. Entrusting the secret to
H.alotus, the Emperor's prcEgiistator — the slave whose
office it Avas to protect him from poison by tasting
every dish before him — and to his physician, Xenophon
of Cos, she consulted Locusta, the Mrs. Turner of
the period of this classical King James, as to the
poison best suited to her purpose. J^ocusta was
mistress of her art, in which long practice had given
her a consummate skill. The poison must not be too
rapid, lest it should cause suspicion ; nor too slow, lest
it should give the Emperor time to consult for the
interests of his son Britannicus ; but it was to be one
which should disturb his intellect without causing
immediate death. Claudius was a glutton, and the
poison was given him with all the m.ore ease because it
was mixed with a dish of mushrooms, of which he was
extravagantly fond. Agrippina herself handed him
the choicest mushroom in the dish, and the poison at
once reduced him to silei?ce. As was too frequently
the case, Claudius was intoxicated at the time, and
was carried off to his bed as if nothing had happened.
A violent colic ensued, and it was feared that this,
with the quantity of wine which he had drunk, would
render the poison innocuous. But Agrippina had
gone too far for retreat , and Xenophon, who knew
that great crimes if frustrated are perilous, if successful
are rewarded, came to her assistance. Under pretence
of causincr him to vomit, he tickled the throat of

AGRIPPINA, THE MOTHER OF NERO. 115

the Emperor with a feather smeared with a swift
and deadly poison. It did its work, and before
morning the Csesar was a corpse.*

As has been the case not unfrequently in history,
from the times of Tarquinins Priscus to those of
Charles II., the death was concealed until everything
had been prepared for the production of a successor.
The palace was carefully^ watched ; no one was even
admitted into it except Agrippina's most trusty parti-
sans. The body was propped up with pillows ; actors
were sent for *' by his own desire " to afford it some
amusement; and priests and consuls were bidden to
offer up their vows for the life of the dead. Giving out
that the Fmperor was getting better, Agrippina took
care to keep Britannicus and his two sisters, Octavia
and Antonia, under lier own immediate eye. As
though overwhelmed with sorrow she wept, and em-

* There is usually found among the writings of Seneca a most
remarkable burlesque called Ludus de Morte Ccesaris. As to its
authorship opinions will always vary, but it is a work of such undoubted
genius, so interesting, and so unique in its character, that I have thought
it necessary to give in an Appendix a brief sketch of its argument.
^Ye may at least hope that this satire, which overflows with the deadliest
contempt for Claudius, is not from the same pen which wrote for Nero
his funeral oration. It has, however, been supposed (without suffi-
cient grounds) to be the lost ' kiroKoKoKvvTwois which Seneca is said to
have written on the apotheosis of Claudius. The very name is a Intter
satire. It imagines the Emperor transformed, not into a god, but into
a gourd — one of those "bloated gourds which sun their speckled bellies
before the doors of the Roman peasants." "The Senate decreed his
divinity ; Seneca translated it \\\\.o pumpkinity" (Merivale, Rom. Emp.
V. 601). 'J'he Ludus begins by spattering mud on the memory of the
divine Claudius ; it ends with a shower of poetic roses over the glor)
of ihe diviner Nero !

120 SENECA.

braced them, and above all kept Britannicus by her
side, kissing him with the exclamation " that he was
the very im.age of his father," and taking care that he
should on no account leave her room. So the day
wore on till it was the hour which the Chald^eans
declared would be tl:e only lucky hour in that unlucky
October day.

Noon came ; the palace doors were suddenly thrown
open ; and Nero with Burrus at his side went out t
the Praetorian cohort which was on guard. By the
order of their commandant, they received him with
cheers. A few only hesitated, looking round them and
asking "Where was Britannicus.-*" Since, however,
he was not to be seen, and no one stirred in his favour,
they followed the multitude. Nero was carried in
triumph to the camp, made the soldiers a short
speech, and promised to each man of them a
splendid donative. He was at once saluted Emperor.
The Senate followed 'the choice of the soldiers, and
the provinces made no demur. Divine honours were
decreed to the murdered man, and preparations made
for a funeral which was to rival in its splendour the
one which Livia had ordered for Augustus. But the
will — which beyond all doubt had provided for the
succession of Britannicus — was quietly done away
with, and its exact provisions were never known.

And on the first evening of his imperial power,
Nero, well aware to whom he owed his throne, gave
to the sentinel who came to ask him the pass for
the night the grateful and significant watchword of
" Optima Mater,"—" the best of mothers V"

CHAPTER XI.

NERO AND HIS TUTOR.

The imperial youth, whose destinies are now in-
extricably mingled with those of Seneca, was accom-
panied to the throne by the acclamations of the
people. Wearied by the astuteness of an Auf^ustus,
the sullen wrath of a Tiberius, the mad ferocity of a
Caius, the senile insensibility of a Claudius, they could
not but welcome the succession of a bright and
beautiful youth, whose fair hair floated over his
shoulders, and whose features displayed the finest
type of Roman beauty. There was nothing in his
antecedents to give a sinister augury to his future
development, and all classes alike dreamt of the
advent of a golden age. We can understand their
feelings if we compare tnem with those of our own
countrymen when the sullen tyranny of Henry VHI.
was followed by the youthful virtue and gentleness
of Edward VI. Happy would it have been for
Nero if his reign, like that of Edward, could have
been cut short before the thick night of many crimes
had settled down upon the promise of its dawn.
For the first five years of Nero's reign — the famous

122 SENECA.

Qinnquenniiiin Neronis — were fondly regarded by the
Romaais as a period of almost ideal happiness. In
reality, it was Seneca who was ruling in Nero's name.
Even so excellent an Emperor as Trajan is said to have
admitted "that no other prince had nearly equalled the
praise of that period." It is indeed probable that those
years appeared to shine with an exaggerated splendour
from the intense gloom which succeeded themj yet
we can see in them abundant circumstances which
were quite sufficient to inspire an enthusiasm of hope
and joy. The young Nero was at first modest and
docile His opening speeches, written with all the
beauty of thought and language which betrayed the
style of Seneca no less than his habitual sentiments,
were full of glowing promises. All those things
which had been felt to be injurious or oppressive he
promised to eschew. He would not, he said, reserve
to himself, as Claudius had done, the irresponsible
decision in all matters of business ; no office or
dignity should be won from him by flattery or pur-
chased by bribes ; he would not confuse his own
personal interests with those of the commonwealth ;
he would respect the ancient prerogatives of the
Senate ; he would confine his own immediate attention
to the provinces and the army.

Nor were such promises falsified by his immediate
conduct. The odious informers who had flourished
in previous reigns were frowned upon and punished.
Offices of public dignity were relieved from unjust
and oppressive burdens. Nero prudently declined
the gold and silver statues and other extravagant

NERO AND HIS TUTOR, 123

honours which were offered to him by the corrupt
and servile Senate, but he treated that body, which,
fallen as it was, continued still to be the main repre-
sentative of constitutional authority, with favour
and respect. Nobles and officials began to breathe
more freely, and the general sense of an intolerable
tyranny was perceptibly relaxed. Severity was re-
served for notorious criminals, and was only inflicted
in a regular and authorized manner, when no one
could doubt that it had been deserved. Above all,
Seneca had disseminated an anecdote about his young
pupil which tended more than any other circum-
stance to his wide-spread popularity. England has
remembered with gratitude and admiration the tearful
reluctance of her youthful Edward to sicrn the death-
warrant of Joan Boucher ; Rome, accustomea to a
cruel indifference to human life, regarded with some-
thing like transport the sense of pity which had
made Nero, when asked to affix his signature to an
order for execution, exclaim, " How I wish that I
did not knozv how to write ! "

It is admitted that no small share of the happiness
of this period was due to the firmness of the honest
Burrus, and the wise, high-minded precepts of Seneca.
They deserve the amplest gratitude and credit for
this happy interregnum, for they had no easy task to
perform. Besides the difficulties which arose from
the base and frivolous character of their pupil, besides
the infinite delicacy which was requisite for the re-
straint of a youth who was absolute master of suck

gigantic destinies, they had the task of curbing the

m2

124 SENECA,

wild and imperious ambition of Agrippina, and of
defeating the incessant intrigues of her many powerfiii
dependents. Agrippina had no doubt persuaded her-
self that her crimes had been mainly committed in
the interests of her son ; but her conduct showed that
she wished him to be a mere instrument in her hands.
She wished to govern him. and had probably calcu-
lated on doing so by the assistance of Seneca, just
as our own Queen Carolme completely managed
George 11. with tiie aid of Sir Robert Walpole. She
rode in a litter with him ; without his knowledge
she ordered the poisoning of M. Silanus, a brother
of her former victim, she goaded Narcissus to
death, against his will ; through her influence the
Senate was sometimes assembled in the palace,
and she took no pains to conceal from the senators
that she was herself seated behind a curtain where
she could hear every word of their deliberations ; —
nay, on one occasion, when Nero was about to give
audience to an important Armenian legation, she
had the audacity to enter the audience-chamber, and
advance to take lier seat by the side of the Emperor.
Every one else was struck dumb with amazement, and
even terror, at a proceeding so unusual ; but Seneca,
with ready and admirable tact, suggested to Nero
that he should rise and meet his mother, thus,
obviating a public scandal under the pretext of filial
affection.

But Seneca from the very first had been guilty of
a fatal error in the education of his pupil. He had
governed him throughout on the ruinous principle of

I^ERO AND HIS TUTOR. 125

concession. Nero was not devoid of talent ; he had
a decided turn for Latin versification, and the few
lines of his composition which have come down to
us, bizarre and affected as they are, yet display a
certain sense of melody and power of language. But
his vivid imagination was accompanied by a want of
purpose ; and Seneca, instead of trying to train him
in habits of serious attention and sustained thought,
suffered him to waste his best efforts in pursuits and
amusements which were considered partly frivolous
and partly disreputable, such as singing, painting,
dancing, and driving. Seneca might have argued that
there was, at any rate,, no great harm in such employ-
ments, and that they probably kept Nero out of
worse mischief. But we respect Nero the less for
his indifferent singing and harp-twanging just as we
respect Louis XVI. less for making very poor locks ;
and, if Seneca had adopted a loftier tone with his
pupil from the first, Rome might have been spared
the disgraceful folly of Nero's subsequent buffooneries
in the cities of Greece and the theatres of Rome. We
may lay it down as an invariable axiom in all high
education, that it is never sensible to permit what is
bad for the supposed sakeof preventing what is worse.
Seneca very probably persuaded himself that with a
mind like Nero's — the innate worthlessness of which
he must early have recognised — success of any high
description would be simply impossible. But this
did not absolve him from attempting the only noble
means by which success could, under any circum-
stances, be attainable. Let us, however, remember

126 SENECA.

that his concessions to his pupil were mainly in
matters which he regarded as indifferent — or, at the
worst, as discreditable — rather than as criminal ; and
that his mistake probably arose from an error in
judgment far more than from any deficiency in moral
character.

Yet it is clear that, even intellectually, Nero was
the worse for this laxity of training. We have already
seen that, in his maiden-speech before the Senate,
every one recognised the hand of Seneca, and many
observed with a sigh that .this was the first occasion
on which an Emperor had not been able, at least to
all appearance, to address the Senate in his own words
and with his own thoughts. Tiberius, as an orator,
had been dignified and forcible ; Claudius had been
learned and polished ; even the disturbed reason of
Caligula had not been wanting in a capacity for
delivering forcible and eloquent harangues ; but Nero's
youth had been frittered away in paltry and indecorous
accomplishments, which had left him neither time
nor inclination for weightier and nobler pursuits.

The fame of Seneca has, no doubt, suffered griev-
ously from the subsequent infamy of his pupil ; and
it is obvious that the dislike of Tacitus to his memory
is due to his connexion with Nero. Now, even
though the tutor's system had not been so wise as,
when judged by an inflexible standard, it might have
been, it is yet clearly unjust to make him responsible
for the depravity of his pupil ; and it must be remem-
bered, to Seneca's eternal honour, that the evidence
of facts, the testimony of contemporaries, and even

NERO AND HIS TUTOR. iz'j

the grudging admission of Tacitus himself, establishes
in his favour that whatever wisdom and moderation
characterised the earlier years of Nero's reign were
due to his counsels ; that he enjoyed the cordial
esteem of the virtuous Burrus ; that he helped to
check the sanguinary audacities of Agrippina ; that
the writings which he addressed to Nero, and the
speeches which he wrote for him, breathed the loftiest
counsels ; and that it was not until he was wholly
rcPxioved from power and inrluence that Nero, under
the fierce impulses of despotic power, developed
those atrocious tendencies of which the seeds had
long been latent in his disposition. An ancient writer
records the tradition that Seneca very early observed
in Nero a savagery of disposition which he could
not wholly eradicate ; and that to his intimate friends
he used to observe that, " when once the lion tasted
human blood, his innate cruelty would return."

But while we give Seneca this credit, and allow
that his intentions were thoroughly upright, we cannot
but impugn \(\'~> judgment for having thus deliberately
adopted the morality of expedience ; and we believe
that to this cause, more than to any other, was due
the extent of his failure and the misery of his life.
We may, indeed, be permitted to doubt whether
Nero himself — a vain and loose youth, the son of bad
parents, and heir to boundless expectations — would,
under any circumstances, have grown up much better
than he did ; but it is clear that Seneca might have
been held in infinitely higher honour but for the
share which he had in his education. Had Seneca

128 SENECA.

been as firm and wise as Socrates, Nero in all proba-
bility would not have been much worse than Alci-
biades. If the tutor had set before his pupil no
ideal but the very highest, if he had inflexibly
opposed to the extent of his ability every tendency
w^hich was dishonourable and wrong, he might
possibly have been rewarded by success, and have
earned the indelible gratitude of mankind ; and if he
had failed he would at least have failed nobly, and
have carried with him into a calm and honourable
retirement the respect, if not the affection, of his
imperial pupil. Nay, even if he had failed com-
pletely, and lost his life in the attempt, it w^ould
have been infinitely better both for him and for
mankind. Even Homer might have taught him that
" it is better to die than live in sin." At any rate
he might have known from study and observation
that an education founded on compromise must
always and necessarily fail. It must fail because it
overlooks that great eternal law of retribution for and
continuity in evil, which is illustrated by every single
history of individuals and of nations. And the edu-
cation which Seneca gave to Nero — noble as it was
in many respects, and eminent as was its partial and
temporary success — was yet an education of compro-
mises. Alike in the studies of Nero's boyhood and
the graver temptations of his manhood, he acted on
the foolishly-fatal principle that

" Had the wild oat not been sown,
The soil left barren scarce had grown
The grain whereby a man may live."

NERO AND HIS TUTOR, 129

Any Christian might have predicted the result ; one
would have thought that even a pagan philosopher
might have been enlightened enough to observe it.
We often quote the lines —

" The child is father of the man,"

and

"Just as the twig is bent the tree inclines."

But the ancients were quite as familiar with the same
truth under other images. *'The cask," wrote Horace,
" will long retain the odour of that which has once
been poured into it when new." Quintilian, de-
scribing the depraved influences which surrounded
even the infancy of a Roman child, said, *' From
these 2,x\'i^ first familiarity, tJien nature^

No one has laid down the principle more em-
phatically than Seneca himself Take, for instance,
the following passage from his Letters, on evil con-
versation. ** The conversation," he says, " of these
men is very injurious : for, even if it does no immediate
harm, it leaves its seeds in the mind, and follows us
even when we have gone from the speakers, — a plague
sure to spring up in future resurrection. Just as those
who have heard a symphony carr)^ in their ears the
tune and sweetness of the song which entangles their
thoughts, and does not suffer them to give their whole
energy to serious matters ; so the conversa*:ion of
flatterers and of those who praise evil things, lingers
longer in the mind than the time of hearing it. Nor is
it easy to shake out of the soul a sweet sound ; it
pursues us, and lingers with us, and at perpetual inter-

I30 SENECA,

vals recurs. Our ears therefore must be closed to evil
words, and that to the very first we hear. For v/hen
they have once begun and been admitted, they acquire
more and more audacity;" and so he adds a litte after-
wards, " our days flow on, and irreparable life passes
beyond our reach."' Yet he who wrote these noble
words was not only a flatterer to his imperial pupil, but
is charged with having deliberately encouraged him in
a foolish passion for a freedwoman named Acte, into
which Nero fell. It was of course his duty to recall
the w^avering aftections of the youthful Emperor to his
betrothed Octavia, the daughter of Claudius, to whom
he had been bound by every tie of honour and
affection, and his union with whom gave some shadow
of greater legitimacy to his practical usurpation. But
princes rarely love the wives to whom they owe any
part of their elevation. Henry VII. treated Elizabeth
of York with many slights. The union of William III.
with Mary was overshadowed by her superior claim
to the royal power ; and Nero from the first regarded
with aversion, which ended in assassination, the poor
young orphan girl who recalled to the popular memory
his slender pretensions to hereditary empire, and whom
he regarded as a possible rival, if her cowed and
plastic nature should ever become a tool in the hands
of more powerful intriguers. But we do not hear of
any attempt on Seneca's part to urge upon Nero the
fulfilment of this high duty, and we find him sinking
into the degraded position of an accomplice with
young profligates like Otho, as the confidant of a
di.shonourable love. Such conduct, which would have.

NERO AND HIS TUTOR. 131

done discredit to a mere courtier, was to a Stoic dis-
graceful. But the principle which led to it is the very
principle to which we have been pointing, — the principle
of moral compromise, the principle of permitting and
encouraging what is evil in the vain hope of thereby
preventing what is worse. It is hardly strange that
Seneca should have erred in this way, for compromise
was the character of his entire life. He appears to
have set before himself the wholly impossible task of
being both a genuine philosopher and a statesman
under the Caesars. He prided himself on being no*"
only a philosopher, but also a man of the world,
and the consequence was, that in both capacities
he failed. It was as true in Paganism as it is in
Christianity, that a man m?cst make his choice be-
tween duty and interest — between the service of
Mammon and the service of God. No man ever
gained anything but contempt and ruin by incessantly
halting between two opinions.

And by not taking that lofty line of duty which a
Zeno or an Antisthenes would have taken, Seneca
became more or less involved in some of the most
dreadful events of Nero's reign. Every one of the
terrible doubts under which his reputation has suf-
fered arose from his having permitted the principle of
expedience to supersede the laws 'of virtue. One or
two of these events we must briefly narrate.

We have already pointed out that the Nemesis

which for so many years had been secretly dogging

the footsteps of Agrippina made her tremble under

the weight of its first cruel blows when she seemed
10 N

i32 SENECA.

to have attained the highest summit of her ambi-
tion. Very early indeed Nero began to be galled
and irritated by the insatiate assumption and
swollen authority of " the best of mothers." The
furious reproaches which she heaped upon him when
she saw in Acte a possible rival to her power drove
him to take refuge in the facile and unphilosophic
worldliness of Seneca's concessions, and goaded him
almost immediately afterwards into an atrocious
crime. He naturally looked on Britannicus, the
youthful son of Claudius, with even more suspicion
and hatred than that with which he regarded Octavia.
Kings have rarely been able to abstain from acts of
severity against those who might become claimants
to the throne. The feelings of King John towards
Prince Arthur, of Henry IV. towards the Earl ot
March, of Mary towards Lady Jane Grey, of Eliza-
beth towards Mary Stuart, of King James towards
Lady Arabella Stua'"t, resembled, but probably by no
means equalled in intensity, those of Nero towards
his kinsman and adoptive brother. To show him
any affection was a dangerous crime, and it fur-
nished a sufficient cause for immediate remov^al if
any attendant behaved towards him with fidelity.
Such a line of treatment foreshadowed the catastrophe
which was hastened by the rage of Agrippina. She
would go, she said, and take with her to the camp the
noble boy who was now of full age to undertake those
imperial duties which a usurper was exercising in
virtue of crimes which she was now prepared to
confess. Then let the mutilated Burrus and the glib-

NERO AND HIS TUTOR.

133

tongued Seneca sec whether they could be a match
for the son of Claudius and the daughter of Ger-
manicus. Such language, uttered with violent ges-
tures and furious imprecations, might well excite the
alarm of the timid Nero. And that alarm was in-
creased by a recent circumstance, which showed that
all the ancestral spirit was not dead in the breast ot
Britannicus. During the festivities of the Saturnalia,
which were kept by the ancients with all the hilarity
of the modern Christmas, Nero had been elected by lot
as '"governor of the feast," and, in that capacity, was
entitled to issue his orders to the guests. To the others
he issued trivial mandates which would not make them
blush ; but Britannicus, in violation of every principle
of Roman decorum, was ordered to stand up in the
middle and sing a song. The boy, inexperienced as
yet even in sober banquets, and wholly unaccustomed
to drunken convivialities, might well have faltered ;
but he at once rose, and with a steady voice began a
strain — probably the magnificent wail of Andromache
over the fall of Troy, which has been preserved to us
from a lost play of Ennius — in which he indicated
his own disgraceful ejection from his hereditary rights.
His courage and his misfortunes woke in the guests a
feeling of pity which night and wine made them less
careful to disguise. From that moment the fate of
Britannicus was sealed. Locusta, the celebrated
poisoner of ancient Rome, was summoned to the
councils of Nero to get rid of Britannicus, as she had
already been summoned to those of his mother when
she wished to disembarrass herself of Britannicus's

134 SENECA.

father. The main difficulty was to avoid discovery,
since nothing was eaten or drunk at the imperial
table till it had been tasted by \h^ prcegustator. To
avoid this difficulty a very hot draught was given to
Britannicus, and when he wished for something cooler
a swift and subtle poison was dropped into the cold
water with which it was tempered. The boy drank,
and instantly sank from his seat, gasping and speech-
less. The guests started up in consternation, and
fixed their eyes on Nero. He with the utmost cool-
ness assured them that it was merely a fit of epilepsy,
to which his brother was accustomed, and from which
he would soon recover. The terror and agitation of
Agrippina showed to every one that she at least was
guiltless of this dark deed ; but the unhappy Octavia,
young as she was, and doubly terrible on every
ground as the blow must have been to her, sat silent
and motionless, having already learnt by her mis-
fortunes the awful necessity for suppressing under an
impassive exterior her affections and sorrows, her
hopes and fears. In the dead of night, amid storms
of murky rain, which were thought to indicate the
wrath of heaven, the last of the Claudii was hastily
and meanly hurried into a dishonourable grave.

We may beh'eve that in this crime Seneca had no
share whatever, but we can hardly believe that he was
ignorant of it after it had been committed, or that he
had no share in the intensely hypocritical edict in
which Nero bewailed the fact of his adoptive brother's
death, excused his hurried funeral, and threw himself
on the additional indulgence and protection of the

NERO AND HIS TUTOR. ^ 135

Senate. Nero showed the consciousness of guilt by
the immense largesses which he distributed to the
most powerful of his friends. " Nor were there want-
ing men," says Tacitus, in a most significant manner,
" ivho accused certain people, notorious for their higJi
professions^ of having at that period divided amo7ig
them villas and houses as though they had been so much
spoil." There can hardly be a doubt that the great
historian intends by this remark to point at Seneca,
to whom he tries to be fair, but whom he could never
quite forgive for his share in the disgraces of Nero's
reign. That avarice was one of Seneca's temptations
is too probable ; that expediency was a guiding
principle of his conduct is but too evident ; and for
a man with such a character to rebut an inuendo is
never an easy task. Nay more, it was after this foul
event, at the close of Nero's first year, that Seneca
addressed him in the extravagant and glowing lan-
guage of his treatise on Clemency. ** The quality of
mercy," and the duty of princes to practise it, has
never been more eloquently extolled ; but it is
accompanied by a fulsome flattery which has in it
something painfully grotesque as addressed by a
philosopher to one whom he knew to have been
guilty, that very year, of an inhuman fratricide.
Imagine some Jewish Pharisee, — a Nicodemus or a
Gamaliel — pronouncing an eulogy on the tenderness
of a Herod, and you have some picture of the appear^
ance which Seneca's consistency must have worn in
the eyes of his contemporaries.

This event took place A.D. 55, in the first year of

n2

136 SENECA.

Nero's Quinq7(enni?cm, and the same year was nearly
signalised by the death of his mother. A charge
of pretended conspiracy was invented against her,
and it is probable that but for the intei*vention of
Burrus, who with Seneca was appointed to examine
into the charge, she would have fallen a very sudden
victim to the cowardly credulity and growing- hatred
of her son. The extraordinary and eloquent audacity
of her defence created a reaction in her favour,
and secured the punishment of her, accusers. But
the ties of affection could not long unite two such
wicked and imperious natures as those of Agrippina
and her son. All history shows that there can be
no real love between souls exceptionally wicked,
and that this is still more impossible when the
alliance between them has been sealed by a com-
plicity in crime. Nero had now fallen into a deep
infatuation for Foppsea Sabina, the beautiful wife
of Otho, and she refused him her hand so long as
he was still under the control of his mother. At
this time Agrippina, as the just consequence of her
many crimes, was regarded by all classes with a fana-
ticism of hatred which in Poppaea Sabina was inten-
sified by manifest self-interest. Nero, always weak,
had long regarded his mother with real terror and
disgust, and he scarcely needed the urgency of con-
stant application to make him long to get rid of her.
But the daughter of Germanicus could not be openly
destroyed, while her own precautions helped to secure
her against secret assassination. It only remained to
compass her death by treachery. Nero had long

NERO AND HIS TUTOR. 137

compelled her to live in suburban retirement, and
had made no attempt to conceal the open rupture
which existed between them. Anicetus, admiral of the
fleet at Misenum, and a former instructor of Nero,
suggested the expedient of a pretended public recon-
ciliation, in virtue of which Agrippina should be in-
vited to Baiae, and on her return should be placed on
board a vessel so constructed as to come to pieces by
the removal of bolts. The disaster mischt then be
attributed to a mere naval accident, and Nero might
make the most ostentatious display of his affection
and regret.

The invitation was sent, and a vessel specially
decorated was ordered to await her movements. But,
either from suspicion or from secret information, she
declined to avail herself of it, and was conveyed to
Baiae in a litter. The effusion of hypocritical affection
with which she was received, the unusual tenderness
and honour with which she was treated, the earnest
gaze, the warm embrace, the varied conversation, re-
moved her suspicions, and she consented to return in
the vessel of honour. As though for the purpose o
revealing the crime, the night was starry and the sea
.aim. The ship had not sailed far, and Crepereius
Gallus, one of her friends, was standing near the
helm, while a lady named Acerronia was seated at
her feet as she reclined, and both were vicing with
each other in the warmth of their congratulations
upon the recent interview, when a crash was heard,
and the canopy above them, which had been
weighted with a quantity of lead, was suddenly

138 SENECA.

let go. Crepereius was crushed to death upon the
spot ; Agrippina and Acerronia were saved by the
projecting sides of the couch on which they were
resting ; in the hurry and alarm, as accompHces were
mingled with a greater number who were innocent o
the plot, the machinery of the treacherous vessel
failed. Some of the rowers rushed to one side of the
ship, hoping in that manner to sink it, but here too
their councils were divided and confused. Acerronia,
in the selfish hope of securing assistance, exclaimed
that she was Agrippina, and was immediately de-
spatched with oars and poles ; Agrippina, silent and
unrecognised, received a wound upon the shoulder, but
succeeded in keeping herself afloat till she was picked
up by fishermen and carried in safety to her villa.

The hideous attempt from which she had been thus
miraculously rescued did not escape her keen intui-
tion, accustomed as it was to deeds of guilt ; but,
seeing that her only chance of safety rested in dis-
simulation and reticence, she sent her freedman
Agerinus to tell her son that by the mercy of heaven
she had escaped from a terrible accident, but to beg
him not to be alarmed, and not to come to see her
because she needed rest.

The news filled Nero with the wildest terror, and
the expectation of an immediate revenge. In horrible
agitation and uncertainty he instantly required the
presence of Burrus and Seneca. Tacitus doubts
whether they may not have been already aware of
what he had attempted, and Dion, to whose gross
calumnies, however, we need pay no attention,

IShRO AND HIS TUTOR. 139

declares that Seneca had frequently urged Nero to
the deed, either in the hope of overshadowing his
own guilt, or of involving Nero In a crime which
should hasten his most speedy destruction at the
hands of gods and men. In the absence of all
evidence we may with perfect confidence acquit
the memory of these eminent men from having
gone so far as this.

It must have been a strange and awful scene. The
young man, for Nero was but twenty-two years
old, poured into their ears the tumult of his agitation
and alarm. White with fear, weak with dissipation,
and tormented by the furies of a guilty conscience,
the wretched youth looked from one to another of his
aged ministers. A long and painful pause ensued.
If they dissuaded him in vain from the crime which he
meditated their lives would hav^ been in dani^cr ; and
perhaps they sincerely thought that things ^had gone
so far that, unless Agrippina were anticipated, Nero
would be destroyed. Seneca was the first to break
that silence of anguish by inquiring of Burrus whether
the soldiery could be entrusted to put her to death.
His reply w^as that the praetorians would do nothing
against a daughter of Germanicus, and that Anicetus
shotdd accomplish what he had proiu.scd. Anicetus
showed himself prompt to crime, and Nero thanked
him in a rapture of gratitude. While the freedman
Agerinus was delivering to Nero his mother's mes-
sage, Anicetus dropped a dagger at his feet, declared
that he had caught him in the very act of attempting
the Emperor's as^^assination, and hurried off with a

I40 SENECA.

band of soldiers to punish Agrippina as the author
of the crime.

The multitude meanwhile were roaming in wild
excitement along the shore ; their torches were seen
glimmering in evident commotion about the scene of
the calamity, where some were wading into the water
in search of the body, and others were shouting in-
coherent questions and replies. At the rumour of
Agrippina's escape they rushed off in a body to her
villa to express their congratulations, where they were
dispersed by the soldiers of Anicetus, who had already
taken possession of it. Scattering or seizing the
slaves who came in their way, and bursting their
passage from door to door, they found the Empress
in a dimly-lighted chamber, attended only by a single
handmaid. "Dost thou too desert me.'*" exclaimed
the wretched woman to her servant, as she rose to
slip away. In silent determination the soldiers sur-
rounded her couch, and Anicetus was the first to strike
her with a stick. " Strike my womb," she cried to
him faintly, as he drew his sword, " for it bore Nero."
The blow of Anicetus was the signal for her immediate
destruction : she was despatched with many wounds,
and was buried that -night at Misenum on a common
couch and with a mean funeral. Such an end, many
years previously, this sister, and wife, and mother of
emperors had anticipated and despised ; for when the
Chaldaeans had assured her that her son would
become Emperor, and would murder her, she is said
to have exclaimed, " Occidat dum imperet," "Let
him slav me if he but reign."

NERO AND HIS TUTOR, 141

It only remained to account for the crime, and offer
for it such lying defences as were most likely to gain
credit. Flying to Naples from a scene which had
now become awful to him, — for places do not
change as men's faces change, and, besides this, his
disturbed conscience made him fancy that he heard
from the hill of Misenum the blowing of a ghostly
trumpet and wailings about his mother's tomb in
the hours of night, — he sent from thence a letter to
the Senate, saying that his mother had been punished
for an attempt upon his life, and adding a list of
her crimes, real and imaginary, the narrative of her
accidental shipwreck, and his opinion that her death
was a public blessing. The author of this shamefu'
document was Seneca, and in composing it he reached
the nadir of his m.oral degradation. Even the lax
morality of a most degenerate age condemned him
for calmly sitting down to decorate with the graces of
rhetoric and antithesis an atrocity too deep for the
powers of indignation. A Seneca could stoop to
write what a Thrasea Paetus could scarcely stoop to
hear ; for in the meeting of the Senate at which the
letter was recited, Thrasea rose In indignation, and
went straight home rather than seem to sanction by
his presence the adulation of a matricide.

And the composition of that gully, elaborate,
shameful letter was the last prominent act of Seneca's
public life.

CHAPTER XII.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END.

Nor was it unnatural that it should be. Moral pre-
cepts, philosophic guidance were no longer possible
to one whose compliances or whose timidity had
led him so far as first to sanction matricide, and then
to defend it. He might indeed be still powerful to
recommend principles of common sense and political
expediency, but the loftier lessons of Stoicism, nay,
even the better utterances of a mere ordinary Pagan
morality, could henceforth only fall from his lips with
>omething of a hollow ring. He might interfere, as
we know he did, to render as innocuous as possible
the pernicious vanity which made Nero so ready to
degrade his imperial rank by public appearances on
the orchestra or in the race-course, but he could
hardly address again such noble teachings as that of
the treatise on Clemency to one whom, on grounds
of political expediency, he had not dissuaded from the
treacherous murder of a mother, who, whatever her
enormities, yet for his sake had sold her very soul.

Although there may have been a strong suspicion
that foul play had been committed, the actual facts aiui

THE BEGINNING OF THE END. 143

details of the death of Agrippina would rest between
Nero and Seneca as a guilty secret, in the guilt of
which Seneca himself must have his share. Such a
position of things was the inevitable death-blow, not
only to all friendship, but to all confidence, and ulti-
mately to all intercourse. We see in sacred history
that Joab's participation in David's guilty secret gave
him the absolute mastery over his own sovereign ; we
see repeatedly in profane history that the mutual
knowledge of some crime is the invariable cause of
deadly hatred between a subject and a king. Such
fechngs as King John may be supposed to have had
to Hubert de Burgh, or King Richard III to Sir
James Tyrrel, or King James I. to the Earl of
Somerset, such probably, in still more virulent
intensity, were the feelings of Nero towards his
whilome " guide, philosopher, and friend."

For Nero very soon learnt that Seneca was no
longer necessary to him. For a time he lingered in
Campania, guiltily dubious as to the kind of recep-
tion which awaited him in the capital. The assurances
of the vile crew which surrounded him soon made
that fear wear off, and when he plucked up the cou-
rage to return to his palace, he might himself have
been amazed at the effusion of infamous loyalty
and venal acclamation with which he was received.
All Rome poured itself forth to meet him ; the Senate
appeared i«n festal robes, with their wives and girls
and boys in long array ; seats and scaffoldings were
built up along the road by which he had to pass, as
though the populace had gone forth to see a triun^ph.

t^ SENECA.

With haughty mien, the victor of a nation of slaves,
he ascended the Capitol, gave thanks to the gods, and
went home to betray henceforth the full perversity
of a nature which the reverence for his mother, such
as it was, had hitherto in part restrained. But the
instincts of the populace were suppressed rather than
eradicated. They hung a sack from his statue by
night in allusion to the old punishment of parricides,
who were sentenced to be flung into the sea, tied up
in a sack with a serpent, a monkey, and a cock.
They exposed an infant in the Forum with a tablet
on which w^as written, "I refuse to rear thee, lest thou
shouldst slay thy mother." They scrawled upon the
blank walls of Rome an iambic line which reminded
all who read it that Nero, Orestes, and Alcmaeon were
murderers of their mothers. Even Nero must have
been well aware that he presented a hideous spectacle
in the eyes of all who had the faintest shade of
righteousness among the people whom he ruled.

All this took place in A.D. 59, and we hear no more
of Seneca till the year 62, a year memorable for the
death of Burrus, who had long been his honest,
friendly, and faithful colleague. In these dark times,
when all men seemed to be speaking in a whisper,
almost every death of a conspicuous and high-minded
man, if not caused by open violence, falls under the
suspicion of secret poison. The death of Burrus may
have been due (from, the description) to diphtheria,
but the popular voice charged Nero with having
hastened his death by a pretended remedy, and
declared that, when the Emperor visited his sick bed,

THE BEGINNING OF THE END. 145

the dying ma-n turned away from his inquiries with
the laconic answer, '* I am well."

His death was regretted, not only from the memory
of his virtues, but also from the fact that Nero ap-
pointed two men as his successors, of whom the one,
Fenius Rufus, was honourable but indolent ; the other
and more powerful, Sofonius Tigellinus, had won for
himself among cruel and shameful associates a pre-
eminence of hatred and of shame.

However faulty and inconsistent Seneca may have
been, there was at any rate no possibility that he
should divide with a Tigellinus the direction of his
still youthful master. He was by no means deceived
as to the position in which he stood, and the few
among Nero's followers in whom any spark of honour
was left informed him of the incessant calumnies
which were used to undermine his influence. Tigel-
linus and his friends dwelt on his enormous wealth and
his magnificent villas and gardens, which could only
have been acquired with ulterior objects, and which
threw into the shade the splendour of the Emperor
himself. They tried to kindle the inflammable
jealousies of Nero's feeble mind by representing
Seneca as attempting to rival him in poetry, and as
claiming the entire credit of his eloquence, while he
mocked his divine singing, and disparaged his accom-
plishments as a harper and charioteer because he
himself was unable to acquire them. Nero, they
urged, was a boy no longer ; let him get rid of his
schoolmaster, and find sufficient instruction in the
exaoiple oi iiis ancestors.

146 . SENECA.

Foreseeing how such arguments must end, Seneca
requested an interview with Nero ; begged to be
suffered to retire altogether from public life ; pleaded
age and increasing infirmities as an excuse for desiring
a calm retreat ; and offered unconditionally to resign
the wealth and honours which had excited the
cupidity of his enemies, but which were simply due to
Nero's unexampled liberality during the eight years
of his government, towards one whom he had regard e-d
as a benefactor and a friend. But Nero did not choose
to let Seneca escape so lightly. He argued that,
being still young, he could not spare him, and
that to accept his offers would not be at all in
accordance with his fame for generosity. A pro-
ficient in the imperial art of hiding detestation
under deceitful blandishments, Nero ended the in-
terview with embraces and assurances of friendship.
Seneca thanked him — the usual termination, as Taci-
tus bitterly adds, of interviews with a ruler — but
nevertheless altered his entire manner of life, forbade
his friends to throng to his levees, avoided all com-
panions, and rarely appeared in public — wishing it to
be believed that he was suffering from weak health, or
was wholly occupied in the pursuit of philosophy.
He well knew the art of courts, for in his book on
Aneer he has told an anecdote of one who, being
asked how he had managed to attain so rare a gift as
old age in a palace, replied, '' By submitting to in-
juries, and returning thanks for them,'' But he must
have known that his life hung upon a thread, for in
the very same year an attempt was made to involve

THE BEGINNING OF THE END. 147

hijn in a charge of treason as one of the friends of
C. Calpurnius Piso, an illustrious nobleman whose
v/calth and ability made him an object of jealousy
and suspicion, though he was naturally unambitious
and devoid of energy. The attempt failed at the
time, and Seneca was able triumphantly to refute the
charge of any treasonable design. But the fact of
such a charge being made showed how insecure was
the position of any man of eminence under the deepen-
ing tyranny of Nero, and it precipitated the conspiracy
which two years afterwards was actually formed.

Not long after the death of Burrus, when Nero
began to add sacrilege to bis other crimes, Seneca
made one more attempt to retire from Rome; and,
when permission was a second time refused, he feigned
a severe illness, and confined himself to his chamber.
It was asserted, and believed, that about this time Nero
made an attempt to poison him by the instrumentality
of his freedman Cleonicus, which was only defeated
by the confession of an accomplice or by the abste-
mious habits of the philosopher, who now took nothing
but bread and fruit, and never quenched his thirst
except out of the running stream.

It was during those two years of Seneca's seclusion
and disgrace that an event happened of imperishable
niterest. On the orgies of a shameful court, on the
supineness of a degenerate people, there burst— as
upon the court of Charles II.— a sudden lightning-
tlash of retribution. In its character, in its extent, in
the devastation nnd anguish of which it was the
cause, in the improvements by which it was foIlo\v> d

I4S SENECA.

in the lying origin to which it was attributed, even in
the general circumstances of the period and character
of the reign in which it happened, there is a close and
singular analogy between the Great Fire of London in
1666 and the Great Fire of Rome in 64. Beginning
in the crovvded part of the city, under the Palatine
and Cselian Hills, it raged, first for six, and then again
for three days, among the inflammable materials of
booths and shops, and driven along by a furious wind,
amid feeble and ill-directed efforts to check its course,
it burst irresistibly over palaces, temples, and por-
ticoes, and amid the narrow tortuous streets of old
Rome, involving in a common destruction the most
magnificent works of ancient art, the choicest manu-
scripts of ancient literature, and the most venerable
monuments of ancient superstition. In a few touches
of inimitable compression, such as the stern genius of
the Latin language permits, but which are too con-
densed for direct translation, Tacitus has depicted the
horror of the scene, — the wailing of panic-stricken
women, the helplessness of the very aged and the very
young, the passionate eagerness for themselves and
for others, the dragging along of the feeble or the
waiting for them, the lingering and the hurry, the
common and inextricable confusion. Many, while
they looked backward, were cut off by the flames
in front or at the sides ; if they sought some
neighbouring refuge, they found it in the grasp of the
conflagration ; if they hurried to some more distant
spot, that too was found to be involved in the same
calamit}'. At last, uncertain what to seek or what to

THE BEGINNING OF THE END. 149

avoid, they crowded the streets, they lay huddled to-
gether in the fields. Some, having lost ail their pos-
sessions, died from the want of daily food ; and others,
who might have escaped, died of a broken heart from
the anguish of being bereaved of those whom they had
been unable to rescue ; while, to add to the universal
horror, it was believed that all attempts to repress the
flames were checked by authoritative prohibition ;
nay more, that hired incendiaries were seen flinging
firebrands in new directions, either because they had
been bidden to do so, or tliat they might exercise their
rapine undisturbed.

The historians and anecdotists of the time, whose
accounts must be taken for what they are worth,
attribute to Nero the origin of the conflagration; and
it is certain that he did not return to Rome until the
fire had caught the galleries of his palace. In vain
did he use every exertion to assist the homeless and
ruined populai/.o.. ; in vain aid he order food to be sold
to them at a price unprecedentedly low, and throw
open to them the monuments of Agrippa, his own
gardens, and a multitude of temporary sheds. A
rumour had been spread that, during the terrible
unfolding of that great ** flower of flame," he had
mounted to the roof of his distant villa, and de-
lighted with the beauty of the spectacle, exulting in
the safe sensation of a new excitement, had dressed
himself in theatrical attire, and sung to his harp a
poem on the burning of Troy. Such a heartless
mixture of buffoonery and affectation had exaspe-
rated the people too deeply for forgiveness, and Nero

ISO SENECA.

thought it necessary to draw off the general odium
into a new channel, since neither hi? largesses nor any-
other popular measures succeeded in removing from
himself the ignominy of this terrible suspicion. What
follows is so remarkable, and, to a Christian reader,
so deeply interesting, that I will give it in the very
words of that great historian whcin I have been so
closely following.

" Therefore, to get rid of this report, Nero trumped
up an accusation against a sect, ' detested for their
atrocities, whom the conimoh people called Christians,
and inflicted on them the most recondite punish-
ments. Christ, the founder of this sect, had been
capitally punished by the Procurator Pontius Pilate, in
the reign of Tiberius ; and this damnable superstition,
repressed for the present, was again breaking out, not
only through Judaea, where the evil originated, but
even through the City, whither from all regions all
things that are atrocious or shameful flow together and
gain a following. Those, therefore, were first arrested
wno confessed their religion, and then on their evi-
dence a vast multitude were condemned, not so much
on the charge of incendiarism, as for their hatred
towards the human race. And mockery was added
to their death ; for they were covered in the skins of
wild beasts and were torn to death by dogs, or
crucified, or set apart for burning, and after the close
of the day were reserved for the purpose of nocturnal
illumination. Nero lent his own gardens for the
spectacle, and gave a chariot-race, mingling with the
people in the costume of a charioteer, ot driving

THE BEGINNING OF THE END. 151

among them in his chariot ; by which conduct he
raised a feehng of commisei*ation towards the suffcrer.-s,
guilty though they were, and deserving of the ex-
tremest penalties, as though they were being exter-
minated, not for the public interests, but to gratify
the savage cruelty of one man."

Such are the brief but deeply pathetic particulars
which have come down to us respecting the first great
persecution of the Christians, and such must have been
the horrid events of which Seneca was a cotemporary,
and probably an actual eye-witness, in the very last
year of his life. Profoundly as, in all likelihood he
must have despised the very name of Christian, a heart
so naturally mild and humane as his must have shud-
dered at the monstrous cruelties devised against the
unhappy votaries of this new religion. But to the
relations of Christianity with the Pagan world we
shall return in a subsequent chapter; and we must
no.v hasten to the end of our biography.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE DEATH OF SENECA.

The false charge which had been brought against
Seneca, and in which the name of Piso had been
involved, tended to urge that nobleman and his
friends into a real and formidable conspiracy. Many
men of influence and distinction joined in it, and
among others Annaeus Lucanus, the celebrated poet-
nephew of Seneca, and Fenius Rufus, the colleague
of Tigellinus in the command of the imperial guards.
The plot was long discussed, and many were ad-
mitted into the secret, which was nevertheless marvel-
lously well kept. One of the most eager conspirators
was Subrius Flavus, an officer of the guards, who
suggested the plan of stabbing Nero as he sang
upon the stage, or of attacking him as he went about
without guards at night in the galleries of his burning
palace. Flavus is even said to have cherished the
design of subsequently murdering Piso likewise, and
of offering the imperial power to Seneca, with the full
cognisance of the philosopher himself.* However this
may have been — and the story has no probability —

* Seejuv. Sat. viii. 212.

^.^-.<i'<7x^-^/V. s^

LUCIUS ANNiEUS SENECA.

THE DEA TH OF SENECA. 153

many schemes were discussed and rejected, from the
difficulty of finding a man sufficiently bold and suf-
ficiently in earnest to put his own life to such immi-
nent risk. WHiile things were still under discussion,
the plot was nearly ruined by the information of
Volusius Proculus, an admiral of the fleet, to whom it
had been mentioned by a frcedwoman of the name
of Ephicharis. Although no sufficient evidence could
be adduced against her, the conspirators thought it
advisable to hasten matters, and one of them, a
senator named Scaevinus, undertook the dangerous
task of assassination. Plautius Lateranus, the consul-
elect, was to pretend to offer a petition, in v/hich he
was to embrace the Emperor's knees and Ihrow him
to the ground, and then Scaevinus was to deal the
fatal blow. The theatrical conduct of Scaevinus —
who took an antique dagger from the Temple of
Safety, made his will, ordered the dagger to be
sharpened, sat down to an unusually luxurious ban-
quet, manumitted or made presents to his slaves,
showed great agitation, and finally ordered ligaments
for wounds to be prepared, — awoke the suspicions of
one of his freedrnen named ]\Iilichus, who hastened
to claim a reward for revealing his suspicions. Con-
fronted with Milichus, Scaevinus met and refuted his
accusations with the greatest firmness ; but when
Milichus mentioned among other things that, the day
before, Scaevinus had held a long and secret conver-
sation with another friend of Piso named Natalis, and
when Natalis, on being summoned, gave a very dif-
ferent account of tlie subject of this conversation from

154 SENECA.

that which Scaevinus had given, they were both put
ill chains ; and, unable to endure the threats and
the sight of tortures, revealed the entire conspiracy.
Natalis was the first to mention the name of Piso,
and he added the hated name of Seneca, either
because he had been the confidential messenger be-
tween the two, or because he knew that he could not
do a greater favour to Nero than by giving him the
opportunity of injuring a man whom he had long
sought every possible opportunity to crush. Scaevinus,
with equal weakness, perhaps because he thought that
Natalis had left nothing to reveal, mentioned the
names of the others, and among them of Lucan, whose
complicity in the plot would undoubtedly tend to give
greater probability to the supposed guilt of Seneca.
Lucan, after long denying all knowledge of the design,
corrupted by the promise of impunity, was guilty of
the incredible baseness of making up for the slowness
of his confession by its completeness, and of naming
among the conspirators his chief friends Gallus and
PoUio, and his own mother Atilla. The woman
Ephicharis, slave though she had once been, alone
showed the slightest constancy, and, by her brave
unshaken reticence under the most excruciating and
varied tortures, put to shame the pusillanimous
treachery of senators and knights. On the second
day, when, with limbs too dislocated to admit of her
standing, she was again brought to the presence ot
her executioners, she succeeded, by a sudden move-
ment, in strangling herself with her own girdle.

In the hurrv and alarm of the moment the slightest

THE DEATH OF SENECA. 155

show of resolution would have achieved the object
of the conspiracy. Fenius Rufus had not yet been
named among the conspirators, and as he sat by the
side of the Emperor, and presided over the torture of
his associates, Subrius Flavus made him a secret sign
to inquire whether even then and there he should stab
Nero. Rufus not only made a sign of dissent, but
actually held the hand of Subrius as it was grasping
the hilt of his sword. Perhaps it would have been
better for him if he had not done so, for it was not
likely that the numerous conspirators would long
permit the same man to be at once their accomplice
and the fiercest of their judges. Shortly afterwards,
as he was urging and threatening, Sc-Evinus remarked,
with a quiet smile, " that nobody knew more about
the matter than he did himself, and that he had better
show his gratitude to so excellent a prince by telling
all he knew." The confusion and alarm of Rufus be-
trayed his consciousness of guilt ; he was seized and
bound on the spot, and subsequently put to death.
^ Meanwhile the friends of Piso were urging him to

take some bold and sudden step, which, if it did not
succeed in retrieving his fortunes, would at least shed
lustre on his death. But his somewhat slothful nature,
A^eakened still further by a luxurious life, was not to
be aroused, and he calmly awaited the end. It was
customary among the Roman Emperors at this period
to avoid the disgrace and danger of public executions
by sending a messenger to a man's house, and order
ing him to put himself to death by whatever means
he preferred. Some raw recruits — for Nero dared not

fS6 SENECA.

intrust any veterans with the duty — brought the
mandate to Piso, who proceedecj to make a will full of
disgraceful adulation towards Nero, opened his veins,
and died. Plautius Lateranus was- not even allowed
the poor privilege of choosing his own death, but,
without time even to embrace his children, was hurried
off to a place set apart for the punishment of slaves,
and there died, without a word, by the sword of
a tribune whom he knew to be one of his own
accomplices.

Lucan, in the prime of his life and the full bloom
of his genius, was believed to have joined the plot
from his indignation at the manner in which Nero's
jealousy had repressed his poetic fame, and forbidden
him the opportunity of public recitations. He too
opened his veins ; and as he felt the deathful chill
creeping upwards from the extremities of his limbs,
he recited some verses from his own " Pharsalia," in
which he had described the similar death of the soldier
Lycidas. They were his last words. His mother
Atilla, whom, to his everlasting infamy, he had be-
trayed, was passed over as a victim too insignificant
for notice, and was neither pardoned nor punished.

But, of all the many deaths which were brought
about by this unhappy and ill-managed conspiracy,
none caused more delight to Nero than that of Seneca,
whom he was now able to dispatch by the sword, since
he had been unable to do so by secret poison. What
share Seneca really had in the conspiracy is unknown.
If he were really cognisant of it, he must have acted
with consummate tact, for no particle of convincing

THE DEATH OF SENECA. '57

evidence was adduced ac^ainst him. All that even
Natalis could relate was, that when Piso had sent him
to complain to Seneca of his not admitting Piso to
more of his intercourse, Seneca had replied " that it
was better for them both to hold aloof from each
other, but that his own safety depended on that of
Piso." A tribune was sent to ask Seneca as to the
truth of this story, and found, — which was in itself
regarded as a suspicious circumstance, — that on that
very day he had returned from Campania to a villa
four miles from the city. The tribune arrived in the
evening, and surrounded the villa with soldiers.
Seneca was at supper, with his wife Paulina and two
friends. He entirely denied the truth of the evidence,
and said that "the only reason which he had assigned
to Piso for seeing so little of him was his weak health
and love of retirement, Nero, who knew how little
prone he was to flattery, might judge whether or no
it was likely that he, a man of consular rank, would
prefer the safety of a man of private station to his
own." Such was the message which tJie tribune
took back to Nero, whom he found sitting with his
dearest and most detestable advisers, his wife Poppaia
ar.d his minister Tigellinus. Nero asked "whether
^Seneca was preparing a voluntary death." On the
tribune replying that he showed no gloom or terror
in his language or countenance, Nero ordered that he
should at once be bidden to die. The message was
taken, and Seneca, without any sign of alarm, quietly
demanded leave to revise his will. This was refused
him, and he then turned to his friends with the

10 SENECA.

remark that, as he was unable to reward their merits
as they had deserved, he would bequeath to them the
only, and yet the most precious, possession left to him,
namely, the example of his life, and if they were
mindful of it they would win the reputation alike for
integrity and for faithful friendship. At the same time
he checked their tears, sometimes by his conversation,
and sometimes with serious reproaches, asking them
" where were their precepts of philosophy, and where
the fortitude under trials which should have been
learnt from the studies of many years ? Did not
every one know the cruelty of Nero ? and what was
left for him to do but to make an end of his master
and tutor after the murder of his mother and his
brother?" He then embraced his wife Paulina, and,
with a slight faltering of his lofty sternness, begged
and entreated her not to enter on an endless sorrow,
but to endure the loss of her husband by the aid of
those noble consolations which she must derive from
the contemplation of his virtuous life. But Paulina
declared that she would die with him, and Seneca, not
opposing the deed which would win her such perma-
nent glory, and at the same time unwilling to leave
her to future wrongs, yielded to her wish. The vein.s
of their arms were opened by the same blow; but
the blood of Seneca, impoverished by old age and
temperate living, flowed so slowly that it was neces-
sary also to open the veins of his legs. This mode
of death, chosen by the Romans as comparatively
painless, is in fact under certain circumstances most
agonizing. Worn out by these cruel tortures, and

THE DBA TH OF SENECA. 159

unwilling to weaken his wife's fortitude by so dreadful
a spectacle, glad at the same time to spare himself
the sight of hti' sufferings, he persuaded her to
go to another room. Even then his eloquence did
not fail. It is told of Andre Chenier, the French
poet, that on his wsCy to execution he asked for
writing materials to record some of the strange
thoug^hts which filled his mind. The wish was denied
him, but Seneca had ample liberty to record his last
utterances. Amanuenses were summoned, who took
down those dying admonitions, and in the time of
Tacitus they still were extant. To us, however, this
interesting memorial of a Pagan deathbed is irrevo-
cably lost.

Nero, meanv/hile, to whom the news of these cir-
cumstances was taken, having no dislike to Paulina,
and unwilling to incur the odium of too much blood-
shed, ordered her death to be prohibited and her
wounds to be bound. She was already unconsciou.s,
but her slaves and freedmen succeeded in saving her
life. She lived a few years longer, cherishing her
husband's memory, and bearing in the attenuation of
her frame, and the ghastly pallor of her countenance,
the lasting proofs of that deep affection which had
characterised their married life.

Seneca was not yet dead, and, to shorten these
protracted and useless sufferings, he begged his friend
and physician Statins Annreus to give him a draught
of hemlock, the same poison by which the great
philosopher of Athens had been put to death. But
his limbs were already cold, and the draught proved

p2

l6o SENECA.

fruitless. He then entered a bath of hot water,
sprinkling the slaves who stood nearest to him, with
the words that he was pouring a libation to Jupiter
the Liberator.* Even the warm water failed to make
the blood flow more speedily, and he was finally
carried into one of those vapour baths which the
Romans called sudatoria^ and stifled with its steam.
His body was burned privately, without any of the
usual ceremonies. Such had been his own wish, ex-
pressed, not after the fall of his fortunes, but at a
time when his thoughts had been directed to his
latter end, in the zenith of his great wealth and
conspicuous power.

So died a Pagan philosopher, whose life must
always excite our interest and pity, although we
cannot apply to him the titles of great or good. He
was a man of high genius, of great susceptibility, of
an ardent and generous temperament, of far-sighted
and sincere humanity. Some of his sentiments arc
so remarkable for their moral beauty and profundity
that they forcibly remind us of the expressions of
St. Paul. But Seneca fell infinitely short of his own
high standard, and has contemptuously been called
"the father of all them that wear shovel-hats." In-
consistency is written on the entire history of his
life, and it has earned him the scathing contempt with
which many writers have treated his memory. " The
business of a philosopher," says Lord Macaulay, in hi.s

* Sicco Polentone, an Italian, who wrote a Life of Seneca (d. 146 1),
makes Seneca a secret Christian, and represents this as an invocation
of Christ, and says that he baptized himself with the water of the bath I

THE DEATH OF SENECA. i6i

most scornful strain, "was to declaim in praise of
poverty, with two millions sterling out at usury ; to
meditate epigrammatic conceits about the evils of
luxury in gardens which moved the envy of sovereigns ;
to rant about liberty while fawning on the insolent
and pampered freedmen of a tyrant ; to celebrate
the divine beauty of virtue with the same pen which
had just before written a defence of the murder of
a mother by a son." " Seneca," says Niebuhr,
" was an accomplished man of the world, who occu-
pied himself very much with virtue, and may have
considered himself to be an ancient Stoic. He
certainly believed that he was a most ingenious
and virtuous philosopher ; but he acted on the
principle that, as far as he himself was concerned, he
could dispense with the laws of morality which he
laid down for others, and that he might give way to
his natural propensities."

In Seneca's life, then, we see as clearly as in those
of many professing Christians that it is impossible
to be at once worldly and righteous. Seneca's utter
failure was due to the vain attempt to combine in
his own person two opposite characters — that of a
Stoic and that of a courtier. Had he been a true
philosopher, or a mere courtier, he would have been
happier, and even more respected. To be both was
absurd : hence, even in his writings, he was driven
into inconsistency. He is often compelled to abandon
the lofty utterances of Stoicism, and to charge philo-
sophers with ignorance of life. In his treatise on a
Happy Life he is obliged to introduce a sort of indirect

i62 SENECA.

autobiographical apology for his wealth and position.*
In spite of his lofty pretensions to simplicity, in spite
of that sort of amateur asceticism which, in common
with other wealthy Romans, he occasionally practised,
in spite of his final offer to abandon his entire patri-
mony to the Emperor, we fear that he cannot be
acquitted of an almost insatiable avarice. We need
not indeed believe the fierce calumnies which charged
him with exhausting Italy by a boundless usury, and
even stirring up a war in Britain by the severity of
his exactions ; but it is quite clear that he deserved
the title of Prcedives, "■ the over-wealthy," by which
he has been so pointedly signalized. It is strange
that the most splendid intellects should so often have
sunk under the slavery of this meanest vice. In the
Bible we read how the " rewards of divination "
seduced from his allegiance to God the splendid
enchanter of Mesopotamia :

" In outline dim and vast

Their fearful shadows cast
The giant form of Empires on then- way

To ruin : — one by ont

They tower and they are gone,
Yet in the prophet's sou! the drc?m.s ot avarice stay.

" No sun or star so bright,

In all the world of light.
That they should draw to heaven his downward eye :

He hears the Almighty's word,

He sees the angel's sword.
Yet low upon the earth his heart and treasure lie."

And in Seneca we see some of the most glowlnj^
pictures of the nobility of poverty combined with the

* Sco Ad Polyh. 37; Ep. 75; De Vii. Beat. 17, 18, 22.

THE DEA TH OF SENECA. -163

most questionable avidity in the pursuit of wealth.
Yet how completely did he sell himself for naught'
It is the lesson which we see in every conspicuously
erring life, and it was illustrated less than three years
afterwards in the terrible fate of the tyrant who
had driven him to death. For a short period of his
life, indeed, Seneca v/as at the summit of power;
yet, courtier as he was, he incurred the hatred, the
suspicion, and the punishment of ail the three Em-
perors during \vhose reigns his manhood was passed.
** Of all unsuccessful men," says Mr. Froude, " in every
shape, whether divine or human or devilish, there is
none equal to Bunyan's Mr. F^acing-both-ways — the
fellow with one eye on heaven and one on earth —
who sincerely preaches one thing and sincerely does
another, and from the intensity of his unreality is
unable either to see or feel the contradiction. He
is substantially trying to cheat both God and the
devil, and is in reality only cheating himself and his
neighbours. This of all characters upon the earth
appears to us to be the one of which there is no hope
at all, a character becoming in these days alarmingly
abundant ; and the abundance of which makes us find
even in a Reineke an inexpressible relief," And, in
point of fact, the inconsistency of Seneca's life was a
conscious inconsistency. " To the student," he says,
** who professe.' his wish to rise to a loftier grade of
virtue, I would answer that this is my ivish also, but
I dare not hope it. I aui preoccupied ivitli vices. AH
I require of myself is, not tc be equal to the bcst^ but
cniy to be better than the bad" No doubt Seneca
12

i6j; SENECA.

meant this to be understood merely for modest self-
depreciation ; but it was far truer than he would have
liked seriously to confess. He must have often and
deeply felt that he was not living in accordance with
the light which was in him.

It would indeed be cheap and easy to attribute the
general inferiority and the many shortcomings of
Seneca's life and character to the fact that he was a
Pagan, and to suppose that if he had known Chris-
tianity he would necessarily have attained to a loftier
ideal. But such a style of reasoning and inference,
commonly as it is adopted for rhetorical purposes,
might surely be refuted by any intelligent child. A
mere intellectual assent to the lessons of Christianity
would have probably been but of little avail to inspire
in Seneca a nobler life. The fact is, that neither the
gift of genius nor the knowledge of Christianity are
adequate to the ennoblement of the human heart,
nor does the grace of God flow through the channels
of surpassing intellect or of orthodox belief. Men
there have been in all ages, Pagan no less than
Christian, who with scanty mental enlightenment
and spiritual knowledge have yet lived holy and
noble lives : men there have been in all ages.
Christian no less than Pagan, who with consummate
gifts and profound erudition have disgraced some of
the noblest words which ever were uttered by some
of the meanest lives which were ever lived. In the
twelfth century was there any mind which shone
more brightly, was there any eloquence which flowed
more mightily, than that of Peter Abelard .'* Yet

THE DEATH OF SENECA. 165

Abelard sank beneath the meanest of his scholastic
cotemporaries in the degradation of his career as
much as he towered above the highest of them in the
grandeur of his genius. In the seventeenth century
was there any philosopher more profound, any
moralist more elevated, than Francis Bacon? Yet
Bacon could flatter a tyrant, and betray a friend,
and receive a bribe, and be one of the latest of
English judges to adopt the brutal expedient ot
enforcinc^ 'confession by the exercise of torture. If
Sonccu defended the murder of Agrippina, Bacon
blackened the character of Essex. *' What I would,
I do not ; but the thing that I would not, that I do,"
might be the motto for many a confession of the sins
of genius ; and Seneca need not blush if we compare
him with men who were his equals in intellectual
power, but whose " means of grace," whose privileges,
whose knowledge of the truth, were infinitely higher
than his own. Let the noble constancy of his death
shed a light over his memory which may dissipate
something of those dark shades which rest on portions
of his history. We think of Abelard, humble, silent,
patient. God-fearing, tended by the kindly-hearted
Peter in the peaceful gardens of Clugny ; we think
of Bacon, neglected, broken, and despised, dying of
the chill caught in a philosophical experiment, and
leaving his memory to the judgment of posterity ;
let us think of Seneca, quietly yielding to his destiny
without a murmur, cheering the constancy of the
moarners round him during the long agonies of his
enforced suicide, and dictating some of the purest

J 66 SENECA.

utterances of Pagan wisdom almost with his latest
breath. The language of his great cotemporary, the
Apostle St. Paul, will best help us to understand his
position. He was one of those who was seeking the
Lordy if haply he might feel after Him, and fiiid Him,
though He be not far f'otn every one of us : for in
Him we live^ and inove^ and kaz>e our behig.

CHAPTER XIV.

SENECA AND ST. PAUL.

Tn the spring of the year 6i, not long after the time
when the murder of Agrippina, and Seneca's jus-
tification of it, had been absorbing the attention of
the Roman world, there disembarked at Puteoli a
troop of prisoner, whom the Procurator of Judcca
had sent to Rome under the charge of a centurion.
Walking among them, chained and weary, but
affectionately tended by two younger companions,*
and treated with profound respect by little deputa-
tions of friends who met him at Appii Forum and
the Three T^iverns, was a man of mean presence and
weather-beaten aspect, who was handed over like the
rest to the charge of Burrus, the Prsefect of the Vtce-
torian Guards. Learning from the letters of the
Jewish Procurator that the prisoner had been guilty
of no serious offence,t but had used his privilege of
Roman citizenship to appeal to Cxsar for protection
acrainst the infuriated malice of his coreligionists —
possibly also having heard from the centurion Julius
some remarkable facts about his behaviour and history
* Luke and Aristarcbus. t Acts xxiv. 23, xxvii. 3.

268 SENECA.

— Burrus allowed him, pending the hearing of his
appeal, to live in his own hired apartment.* This
lodging was in all probability in that quarter of the
city, opposite the island in the Tiber, which corre-
sponds to the modern Trastevere. It was the resort
of the very lowest and meanest of the populace — -that
promiscuous jumble of all nations which makes Tacitus
call Rome at this time " the sewer of the universe."
It was here especially that the Jews exercised some
of the meanest trades in Rome, selling matches, and
old clothes, and broken glass, or begging and fortune-
telling on the Cestian or Fabrician bridges-f. In one
of these narrow, dark, and dirty streets, thronged by
the dregs of the Roman populace, St. Mark and St.
Peter had in all probability lived when they founded
the little Christian Church at Rome. It was un-
doubtedly in the same despised locality that St. Paul,
— the prisoner who had been consigned to the care of
Burrus, — hired a room, sent for the principal Jews,
and for two years taught to Jews and Christians, and
to any Pagans who would listen to him, the doctrines
which were destined to regenerate the world.

Any one entering that mean and dingy room would
have seen a Jew with bent body and furrowed counte-
nance, and with every appearance of age, weakness,
and disease, chained by the arm to a Roman soldier.

* Acts xxviii. 30, eV Ihlc^) jxiaBdjixari,

\ Mart. Ep. i. 42 ; Juv. xiv. i86. In these few paragraphs I follow
M. Aubertin, who (as well as many other authors) has collected many
of the principal passages in which Roman writers allude to the Jews
and Christians.

SENECA AND ST. PAUL. 169

But it is impossible that, had they deigned to look
closer, they should not also have seen the gleam of
genius and enthusiasm, the fire of inspiration, the
serene light of exalted hope and dauntless courage
upon those withered features. And though /le was
chained, "the Word of God was not chained."* Had
they Hstened to the words which he occasionally
dictated, or overlooked the large handwriting which
alone his weak eyesight and bodily infirmities, as well
as the inconvenience of his chains, permitted, they
would have heard or read the immortal utterances
which strengthened the faith of the nascent and
struggling Churches in Ephesus, Philippi, and Colossae.
and which have since been treasured among the most
inestimable possessions of a Christian world,

His efforts were not unsuccessful ; his misfortunes
were for the furtherance of the Gospel ; his chains
were manifest "in all the palace,, and in ail other
places ; " f and many waxing confident by his bonds
were much more bold to speak the word without
fear. Let us not be misled by assuming a wrong
explanation of these words, or by adopting the
Middle Age traditions which made St. Paul convert
some of the immediate favourites of the Emperor,
and electrify with his eloquence an admiring Senate.
The v/ord here rendered "palace "J may indeed have
that meaning, for we know that among the early
converts were "they of Caesar's household ;"§ but
these were in all probability — if not certainly — Jews

2 Tim. ii. 9. X *'' oAw tu5 TrpaiTwpiu}.

f Phil. i. 12. § riiiJ. iv. 22.

17^ SENECA.

of the lowest rank, who were, as we know, to be found
among the htmdreds of unfortunates of every age and
country who composed a ^ovadSi familia. And it is
at least equally probable that the word " prretorium "
simply means the barrack of that detachment of
Roman soldiers from which Paul's gaolers were taken
in turn. In such labours St. Paul in all probability
spent two years (6i — 6'^, during which occurred the
divorce of Octavia, the marriage with Poppaea, the
death of Burrus, the disgrace of Seneca, and the many
subsequent infamies of Nero.

It is out of such materials that some early Christian
forger thought it edifying to compose the work which
is supposed to contain the correspondence of Seneca
and St. Paul. The undoubted spuriousness of that
work is now universally admitted, and indeed the
forgery is too clumsy to be even worth reading. But
it is worth while inquiring whether in the circum-
stances of the time there is even a bare possibility
that Seneca should ever have been among the readers
or the auditors of Paul.

And the answer is. There is absolutely no such
probability. A vivid imagination is naturally attracted
by the points of contrast and resemblance offered
by two such characters, and we shall see that there
is a singular likeness between many of their senti-
ments and expressions. But this was a period in
which, as M. Villemain observes, " from one extre-
mity of the social world to the other truths met each
other without recognition." Stoicism, noble as were
many of its precepts, lofty as was the morality it

SENECA AND ST. PAUL. 171

professed, deeply as it was imbued in many respects
with a semi-Christian piety, looked upon Christianity
with profound contempt. The Christians disliked
the Stoics, the Stoics despised and persecuted the
Christians. " The world knows nothing of its greatest
men." Seneca would have stood aghast at the very
notion of liis receiving the lessons, still more of his
adopting the religion, of a poor, accused, and wander-
ing Jew. The haughty, wealthy, eloquent, prosperous,
powerful philosopher would have smiled at the notion
that any future ages would suspect him of having
borrowed any of his polished and epigrammatic
lessons of philosophic morals or religion from one
whom, if he heard of him, he would have regarded
as a poor wretch, half fanatic and half barbarian.

We learn from St. Paul himself that the early con-
verts of Christianity were men in the very depths
of poverty,* and that its preachers were regarded as
fools, and weak, and were despised, and naked, and
buffeted — persecuted and homeless labourers — a
spectacle to the world, and to angels, and to men,
" made as the filth of the earth and the offscourmsf
of all things." We know that their preaching was
to the Greeks " foolishness," and that, when they spoke
of Jesus and the resurrection, their hearers mocked f
and jeered. And these indications are more tiian
confirmed by man}' contemporary passages of ancient
writers. We have already seen the violent expressions

* 2 Cor. viii. 2.

+ ^Y-X^^^a^Qv. Acts xvii. 32. The word expresses the most profound
and unconcealed contempt.

Ci2

172 SENECA.

of hatred which the ardent and high-toned soul
of Tacitus thought applicable to the Christians ; and
such language is echoed by Roman writers of every
character and class. The fact is that at this time
and for centuries afterwards the Romans regarded
the Christians with such lordly indifference that — like
Festus, and Felix, and Seneca's brother Gallio — they
never took the trouble to distinguish them from the
Jews. The distinction was not fully realized by
the Pagan world till the cruel and wholesale massacre
of the Christians by the pseudo-Messiah Barchochebas
m the reign of Adrian opened their eyes to the fact of
the irreconcileable differences which existed between
the two religions. And pages might be filled with
the ignorant and scornful allusions which the heathen
applied to the Jews. They confused them with the
whole degraded mass of Egyptian and Oriental im-
postors and brute-worshippers ; they disdained them
as seditious, turburient, obstinate, and avaricious ; they
regarded them as mainly composed of the very
meanest slaves out of the gross and abject multitude ;
their proselytism they considered as the clandestine
initiation into some strange and revolting mystery,
which involved as its direct teachings contempt of
the gods, and the negation of all patriotism and all
family affection ; they firmly believed that they wor-
shipped the head of an ass ; they thought it natural
that none but the vilest slaves and the silliest women
should adopt so misanthropic and degraded a super-
stition; they characterized their customs as "absurd,
sordid, foul, and depraved," and their nation as " prone

SENECA AND ST. PAUL. 173

to superstition, opposed to religion."* And as far as
they made any distinction between Jews and Chris-
tians, it was for the latter that they reserved their
choicest and most concentrated epithets of hatred
and abuse. A "new," "pernicious," "detestable,"
"execrable," superstition is the only language with
which Suetonius and Tacitus vouchsafe to notice it.
Seneca — though he must have heard the name of
Christian during the reign of Claudius (when both
they and the Jews were expelled from Rome, " be-
cause of their perpetual turbulence, at the instigation
of Chrestus," as Suetonius ignorantly observed), and
during the Neronian persecutions — never once alludes
to them, and only mentions the Jews to apply a
few contemptuous remarks to the idleness of their
sabbaths, and to call them " a most abandoned race."
The reader will now judge whether there is the
slightest probability that Seneca had any intercourse
with St. Paul, or was likely to have stooped from his
superfluity of wealth, and pride of power, to take
lessons from obscure and despised slaves in the
purlieus inhabited by the crowded households of
Caesar or Narcissus.

* Tac Hist. i. 13 : ib. v. 5 : Juv. xiv. 85 ; Pers. v. 190, &c

CHAPTER XV.

senega's resemblances to scripture.

And yet in a very high sense of the word Seneca
may be called, as he is called in the title of this book,
a Seeker after God ; and the resemblances to the
sacred writings which may be found in the pages of
his works are numerous and striking. A few of
these will probably interest our readers, and will put
them in a better position for understanding how large
a measure of truth and enlightenment had rewarded
the honest search of the ancient philosophers. We
will place a few such passages side by side with the
texts of Scripture which they resemble or recall.

I.

God's Indzuellins!' Presence,

" Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and
that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?" asks St.
Paul (i Cor. iii. i6).

*' God is near yotc, is with yoii^ is zvithin you,^^-
writes Seneca to his friend Lucilius, in the 41st of
thosQ^ Letters which abound in his most valuable mo-
ral reflections ; "« sacred Spirit dzvells zvithin iis^ the
174

RESEMBLANCES TO SCRIPTURE. 175

observe^' and guardian of all our evil and our good . . .
there is no good man zvitJiont God''

And again [Ep. J'^) : '' Do you zvonder that man goes
to the gods ? God comes to men : nay, zvhat is yet
nearer, He comes into men. No good mind is holy
ivithoiit God!'

2. The Eye of God.

"■ All things are naked and opened unto the eyes of
Him with whom we have to do." (Heb. iv. 13.)

" Pray to thy Father which is in secret ; and thy
Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee
openly." (Matt. vi. 6.)

Seneca {On Providence, i) : ^^ It is no advantage
that conscience is shut within us ; we lie opcji to God!'

Letter ^'}^ : " What advantage is it that anything is
hidden from man ? Nothing is closed to God : He is
prescjtt to our minds, and eriters into our central
thoughts!'

Letter 83 : " We must live as if we zvere living in
sight of all men ; zve must think as tJiough some one
could and can gaze into our inmost breast."

3. God is a Spirit.

St. Paul, " We ought not to think that the God-
head is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by
art and man's device." (Acts xvii. 29.)

Seneca {Letter 31): ^^ Even from a corner it is
possible to spring up into Jieaven : rise, tJierefore, and
form tJiy self into a fashion zvorthy of God ; thou canst
not do this, however, with gold and silver : an image

176

SENECA

like to God cannot be formed out of such materials as
t/iese"

4. Imitating God.

**Be ye therefore followers (/jnfujrai, imitators) of
God, as dear children." (Eph. v. i.)

" He that in these things [righteousness, peace,
joy in the Holy Ghost] serveth Christ is acceptable
to God." (Rom. xlv. 18.)

Seneca (Letter 95) : "Do yon wish to render the
gods propitiotis ? Be virtuous. To honotir them it is
enough to imitate them!'

Letter 124: ^' Let man aim at the good wJiich
belongs to him. What is this good? A mind reformed
and pure ^ the imitator of God, raising itself above thingr
human., confining all its desires withijt itself"

5. Hypocrites like whitcd Sepulchres.

" Vv'^oe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites !
for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed
appear beautiful outward, but are within full of
dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness." (Matt,
xxiii. 27.)

Seneca : " Those zvhom you regard as happy, if you
saiv them, not in tJieir externals, but in their hidden
aspect, are zuretchcd, sordid, base ; like their own walls
adorned outwardly. It is no solid and genuine felicity ;
it is a plaster, and that a thin one ; and so, as long as
th^ can stand and be seen at their pleasure, they shine
and impose on us : whett anything has fallen which
dtsturhs and uncovers them^ it is evident how much

RESEMBLANCES TO SCRIPTURE. 177

deep and real foulness an extraneons splendour lias
eo7ieealed!*

6. Teaching compai'ed to Seed.

" But other fell into good ground, and brought
forth fruit ; some an hundred-fold, some sixty-fold,
some thirty-fold." (Matt. xiii. 8.)

Seneca {Letter 38) : " Words must be soivn like
seed ; ivhich, although it be small, when it hath found
a suitable ground, unfolds its strength, and from very
small size is expanded into the largest ifzerease. Reason
does the same .... The things spoken are few ; but if
the mijid have received the^n ivell, they gain strength
and grow."

7. A II Men are Sinners.

" If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves
and the truth is not in us." (i John i. 8.)

Seneca {On Anger, i. 14, ii. 27): ^' If we wish to
be just judges of all tilings, let us first persuade our-
selves of this: — tJiat there is not one of us ivithoiit
fault. . . . No man is found who can acquit himself :
and he who calls Jiintself innoce7it does so witJi reference
to a witness, and not to his conscience!'

8. Avarice,

"The love of money is the root of all evil."
(i Tim. vi. 10.)

Seneca (^On Tranquillity of Soul, 8): " Riches
. . . the greatest source of hu77tan trouble. ^^

" Be content with such things as ye have."
(Heb. xiii. 5.)

178 SENECA.

" Having food and raiment, let us be therewith
content." (i Tim. vi. 8.)

Seneca {Letter 1 14) : " We shall be wise if we desire
but little ; if each man takes count of kiinself and at
the same time measures his own body, he will know hozv
little it can contain, and for hozv short a time!'

Letter no: " We have polenta, we have water; let
us challenge Jnpiter himself to a comparison of bliss I "

" Godliness with contentment is great gain." (i Tim.
vi. 6.)

Seneca {Letter no): " Why are you struck with
wonder and astonishment ? Lt is all display I Those
things are shotun, not possessed. . . . Turn thyself
rather to the true riches, learn to be content with little^

"■ It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a
needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom
of God." (Matt. xix. 24.)

Seneca {Letter 20) : " He is a high-soulcd man who
sees riches spread around him, and hears rather than
feels that they are his. Lt is much not to be corrupted
by fellowship with riches : great is he who in the midst
of wealth is poor ^ but safer he who has no wealth at all!'

9. TJie Duty of Kindness.

" Be kindly affection ed one to another with
brotherly love." (Rom. xii. 10.)

Seneca {On Anger, i. 5) : ''Man is born for mutual
a'xTJ'-tancey

*• Thou shalt love thy neighbour as tbyFelf." (TyCv.
xiv. 18.)

RESEMBLANCES TO SCRIPTURE. 179

Letter 48 : " Yon must live for anotJier, if yon
ivisJi io live for yourself r

On A nger, iii. 43 : " JV/iile we are among men let
tis cultivate kindness ; let us not he to any man a cause
either of peril or of fear"

10. Our common Membership.

*' Ye are the body of Christ, and members in par-
ticular." (i Cor. xii. 27.)

"We being many are one body in Christ, and
every one members one of another." (Rom. xii. 5.)

Seneca {Letter 95): ^' Do we teach that Jie should
stretch his hand to the shipzvrecked^ show his path to
the wanderer, divide his bread with the hungry f . . .
ivhen I could briefly deliver to him the formula of
human duty : all this that you see, in whicJi things
divine and human are included, is one: we are
members of one great body!'

1 1 . Secrecy in doing Good.

" Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand
doeth." (Matt. vi. 3.)

Seneca {On Benefits, ii. ii): ^^ Let him who hath
conferred a favour hold his tongue. . . . In conferring
a favour nothing should be mor€ avoided tJian pricier

12. God's impartial Goodness.

" He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the
good, and sendeth rain on the just nnd on the uniust."

(Matt. V. 45)

1:; R

i8c . SENECA,

Seneca {On Benefits, i. i) : ''How many are
iinwortJiy of the light ! and yet the day dawns!'

Id. vii. 31:" The gods begin to confer benefits on
those who recognise them not, they continue them to those
who are thankless for them. . . . They distribute their
blessings in impartial tenor thi^ough the nations and
peoples ; . . they sprinkle the earth with timely showers,
they stir the seas zvith wind, they mark ont the seasons
by the revolution of the constellations, they temper the
winter and summer by the intervention of a gentler air!'

It would be a needless task to continue these
parallels, because by reading any treatise of Seneca
a student might add to them by scores ; and they
prove incontestably that, as far as moral illumination
was concerned, Seneca " was not far from the king-
dom of heaven." They have been collected by several
writers ; and all of these here adduced, together with
many others, may be found in the pages of Fleury,
Troplong, Aubertin, and others. Some authors, like
M. Fleury, have endeavoured to show that they can
only be accounted for by the supposition that Seneca
had some acquaintance with the sacred writings.
M. Aubertin, on the other hand, has conclusively
demonstrated that this could not have been the case.
Many words and expressions detached from their
context have been forced into a resemblance with
the words of Scripture, when the context wholly
militates against its spirit ; many belong to that
great common stock of moral truths which had been
elaborated by the conscientious labours of ancient.

RESEMBLANCES TO SCRIPTURE. i8i

philosophers ; and there is hardly one of the thoughts
so eloquently enunciated which may not be found
even more nobly and more distinctly expressed in
the writings of Plato and of Cicero. In a subsequent
chapter we shall show that, in spite of them all, the
divergences of Seneca from the spirit of Christianity
are at least as remarkable as the closest of his
resemblances ; but it will be more convenient to do
tliis when we hav^e also examined the doctrines of
those two other great representatives of spiritual en-
lightenment in Pagan souls, Epictetus the slave and
Marcus Aurelius the emperor.

Meanwhile, it is a matter for rejoicing that writings
such as these give us a clear proof that in all ages
the Spirit of the Lord has entered into holy men,
and made them sons of God and prophets. God
"left not Himself without witness" among them.
The language of St." Thomas Aquinas, that many a
heathen has had an " implicit faith," is but another
way of expressing St. Paul's statement that "not
having the law they were a law unto themselves, and
showed the work of the law written in their hearts."*
To them the Eternal Power and Godhead were known
from the things that do appear, and alike from the
voice of consience and the voice of nature they
derived a true, although a partial and inadcquatt!,
knowledge. To them " the voice of nature was the
voice of God." Their revelation was the law of
nature, which was confirmed, strengthened, and ex-
tcridod.. but not suspended, by the written lav/ of God.t

* Rom. i. 2. t Hooker, lucl. PrI. iii. 8.

J 82 SENECA.

The knowledge thus derived, i.e. the sum-total of
religious impressions resulting from the combination
of reason and experience, has been called "natural
religion ;" the term is in itself a convenient and
unobjectionable one, so long as it is remembered that
natural religion is itself a revelation. No antithesis
is so unfortunate and pernicious as that of natural
with revealed religion. It is " a contrast rather of
words than of ideas ; it is an opposition of abstractions
to which no facts really correspond." God has re-
vealed Himself, not in one but in many ways, not only
by inspiring the hearts of a few, but by vouchsafing
His guidance to all who seek it, " The spirit of man
is the candle of the Lord," and it is not religion but
apostasy to deny the reality of any of God's reve-
lations of truth to man, merely because they have
not descended through a single channel. On the
contrary, we ought to hail with gratitude, instead of
viewing with suspicion, the enunciation by heathen
writers of truths which we might at first sight have
been disposed to regard as the special heritage of
Christianity. In Pythagoras, and Socrates, and Plato,
— in Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius — we
see the light of heaven struggling its impeded way
through clouds of darkness and ignorance ; we thank-
fully recognise that the souls of men in the Pagan
world, surrounded as they were by perplexities and
dangers, were yet enabled to reflect, as from the dim
surface of silver, some image of what was divine and
true ; we hail, with the great and eloquent Boss'j^t^
"The Christianity of Nature." ''The divine

RESEMBLANCES TO SCRIPTURE. \Zi

image in man," says St. Bernard, "may be burned, but
it cannot be burnt out."

And this is the pleasantest side on which to con-
sider the Hfe and the writings of Seneca. It is true
that his style partakes of the defects of his age, that
the briUiancy of his rhetoric does not always com-
pensate for the defectiveness of his reasoning ; that
he resembles, not a mirror which clearly reflects the
truth, but " a glass fantastically cut into a thousand
spangles;" that side by side with great moral truths
we sometimes find his worst errors, contradictions, and
paradoxes ; that his eloquent utterances about God
often degenerate into a vague Pantheism ; and that
even on the doctrine of immortality his hold is too
slight to save him from waverings and contradictions:*
yet as a moral teacher he is full of real greatness, and
was often far in advance of the general opinion of
his age. Few men have written more finely, or with
more evident sincerity, about truth and courage, about
the essential equality of man,t about the duty of
kindness and consideration to slaves,:} about tender-
iiess even in dealing with sinners, § about the glory of
unselfishness, IJ about the great idea of humanity^ as
something which transcends all the natural and arti-
ficial prejudices of country and of caste. Many of
his writings are Pagan sermons and moral essays of
the best and highest type. The style, as Ouintilian

* Consol. ad Polyb. 27; Ad Ilelv, 17; Ad Marc. 24, stqq.
t Ep. 32 ; De Benef. iii. 2. ' J De Ira, iii. 29, 32.

§ Ibid. i. 14 ; De Vit. beat. 24. || Ep. 55, 9.

H Ibid. 28 \ Do Oti Sapientis, 31.

r2

1 8a SENECA.

say^^, " abounds in delightful faults," but the strain ol
sentiment is never otherwise than high and true.

He is to be regarded rather as a wealthy, eminent,
and successful Roman, who devoted most of his
leisure to moral philosophy, than as a real philo-
sopher by habit and profession. And in this point
of view his very inconsistencies have their charm,
as illustrating his ardent, impulsive, imaginative
temperament. He was no apathetic, self-contained,
impassible Stoic, but a passionate, warm-hearted man,
who could break into a flood of unrestrained tears at
the death of his friend Annaeus Serenus,--' and feel a
trembling solicitude for the welfare of his wife and
I'ttle ones. His was no absolute renunciation, no
impossible perfection ;t but few men have painted
miore persuasively, with deeper emotion, or more
entire conviction, the pleasures of virtue, the calm of
a well-regulated soul, the strong and severe joys of a
lofty self-denial. In his youth, he tells us, he was
preparing himself for a righteous life, in his old age
for a noble death. | And let us not forget, that when
the hour of crisis came which tested the real calm
and bravery of his soul, he was not found wanting.
" With no dread," he writes to Lucilius, " I am pre-
paring myself for that day on which, laying aside
all artifice or subterfuge, I shall be able to judge
respecting myself whether I merely speak or really
feel as a brave man should ; whether alt those words
of haughty obstinacy which I have hurled against
fortune were mere pretence and pantomime

* Ep. 63. t Martha, Lcs Moralistcs, p. 61. X Ep. ^L

RESEMBLANCES TO SCRIPTURE. 185

Disputations and literary talks, and words collected
from the precepts of philosophers., and eloquent dis-
course, do not prove the true strength of the soul.
For the mere speech of even the most cowardly is
bold ; what you have really achieved will then be
manifest when your end is near. I accept the terms,
I do not shrink from the decision."*

" Accipio conditioncm^ noit reformido judicium^
They were courageous and noble words, and they
were justified in the hour of trial. When we remember
the sins of Seneca's life, let us recall also the constancy
of his death ; while we admit the inconsistencies of
his systematic philosophy, let us be grateful for the
genius, the enthusiasm, the glow of intense conviction,
with which he clothes his repeated utterance of truths,
which, when based upon a surer basis, were found
adequate for the moral regeneration of the world.
Nothing is more easy than to sneer at Seneca, or to
write clever epigrams on one whose moral attainments
fell infinitely short of his own great ideal. But after
all he was not more inconsistent than thousands of
those who condemn him. With all his faults he yet
lived a nobler and a better life, he had loftier aims,
he was braver, more self-denying — nay, even more
consistent — than the majority of professing Christians.
It would be well for us all if those who pour such
scorn upon his memory attempted to achieve one
tithe of the good which he achieved for humanity and
for Rome. His tlioughts deserve our imperishable
gratitude : let him who is without sin among us be
t;agcr to fling stones at his failures and his sins!

* Kp. 26.

EPICTETUS.

CHAPTER I.

THE LIFE OF EPICTETUS, AND HOW HE REGARDED IT.

In the court of Nero, Seneca must have been thrown
into more or less communication with the power-
ful freedmen of that Emperor, and especially with
his secretary or librarian, Epaphroditus. Epaphro-
ditus was a constant companion of the Emperor ;
he was the earliest to draw Nero's attention to the
conspiracy in which Seneca himself perished. There
can be no doubt that Seneca knew him, and had visited
at his house. Among the slaves who thronged that
house, the natural kindliness of the philosopher's
heart may have drawn his attention to one little lame
Phrygian boy/ deformed and mean-looking,) whose
face— if it were any index of the mind within — must
even from boyhood have worn a serene and patient
look. The great conrticr, the great tutor of the
Emperor, the great Stoic and favourite writer of his
age, would indeed have been astonished if he had been
suddenly told that that wretched-looking little slave-

1{IS LIFE, AND HOW HE REGARDED IT, 1S7

lad was destined to attain purer and clearer heights
of philosophy than he himself had ever done, and
to become quite as illustrious as himself, and far more
respected as an exponent of Stoic doctrines. P'or
that lame boy was Epictetus — Epictetu-s for whom was
written the memorable epitaph : " I was Epictetus, a
slave, and maimed in body, and a beggar for poverty,
and dear to the iinmot^tals!''

Although we have a clear sketch of his philosophical
doctrines, we have no materials whatever for any but
the most meagre description of his life. The picture
of his mind — an effigy of that which he alone regarded
as his true self — may be seen in his works, and to this
we can add little except a few general facts and
uncertain anecdotes.

Epictetus was probably born in about the fiftieth
year of the Christian era ; but we do not know the
exact date of his birth, nor do we even know his real
name. "Epictetus" means "bought" or "acquired,"
and is simply a servile designation. He was born at
Hierapolis, in Phrygia, a town between the rivers
Lycus and Meander, and considered by some to be the
capital of the province. The town possessed several
natural wonders — sacred springs, stalactite grottoes,
and a deep cavern remarkable for its mephitic exha-
lations. It is more interesting to us to know that it
was within a few miles of Colossae and Laodicea, and
is mentioned by St. Paul (Col. iv. 13) in connexion
with those two cities. It must, therefore, have pos-
sessed a Christian Church fn^ii the earliest time^ and,
if Epictetus spent any part of his boyhood there, he

1 88 EPJCTETUS.

might have conversed with men and women of humble
rank who had heard read in their obscure place of
meeting the Epistle of St. Paul to the Colossians, and
the other, now lost, which he addressed to the Church
of Laodicea.*

It is probable, however, that Hierapolis and its
associations produced very little influence on the
mind of Epictetus. (His parents were people in the
very lowest and humblest class, and their moral
character could hardly have been high, or they would
not have consented under any circumstance to sell
into slavery their sickly childy Certainly it could
hardly have been possible for Epictetus to enter into
the world under less enviable or less promising
auspices. But the whole system of life is full of divine
and memorable compensations, and Epictetus expe-
rienced them. God kindles the light of genius where
He will, and He can inspire the highest and most
regal thoughts even into the meanest slave-: —

" Such seeds ai-e scatter' d night and day
By the soft wind from heaven,
And in the poorest human clay
Have taken root and thriven."

What were the accidents — or rather, what was "the
unseen Providence, by man nicknamed chance" —
which assigned Epictetus to the house of Epaphroditus
we/ do not know. To a heart refined and noble there
could hardly have been a more trying position. The
slaves of a Roman yiT'/^z'/^'^ were crowded together in
immense gangs; they were liable to the most violent

* Col. iv. i6.

HIS LIFE, AND HOW HE REGARDED IT. \^

and capricious punishments ; they might be subjected
to the most degraded and brutahsing influencesj
Men sink too often to the level to which they are
supposed to belong. Treated with infamy for l^ong
years, they are apt to deem themselves worthy of
infamy — to lose that self-respect which is the inv^a-
riable^ concomitant of religious feeling, and which,
apart from religious feeling, is the sole preventive
of personal degradation. Well may St. Paul say,
"Art thou called, being a servant.'* care not for it :
but if tJioiL may est be made free, 2ise it ratJier.''*

It is true that even in tire heathen world there began
at this time to be disseminated among the best and
wisest thinkers a sense that slaves were made of the
same clay as their masters, that they differed from
freeborn men onh' in the externals and accidents of
their position, and that kindness to them and consi-
deration for their difSculties was a common and
elementary duty of humanity. '' I am giad to learn/'
says Seneca, in one of his interesting letters to Luci-
lius, " that you live on terms of familiarity with your
slaves ; it becomes your prudence and your erudition.
Are they slaves .-* Nay, they are men. Slaves 1 Nay,
companions. Slaves } Nay, humble friends. Slaves 'i
Nay, fellow-slaves, if you but consider that fortune
has power over you both."' He proceeds, in a passage
to which we have already alluded, to reprobate the
liaughty and inconsiderate fashion of keeping tiien^
standing for hours, mute and fastmg, wiiile their
masters gorged themselves at the banquet. He

*' I Cor. vii. 2i.

I90 EPICTETUS.

V^plores the cruelty which thinks it necessary
to punish with terrible severity an accidental cough
or sneeze.y He quotes the proverb — a proverb
which reveals a whole history — " So many slaves, so
many foes," and proves that they are not foes,
but that men made them so ; whereas, when kindly
treated, when considerately addressed, they would
be silent, even under torture, rather than speak to
their master's disadvantage. ** Are they not sprung,"
he asks, " from the same origin, do they not breathe
the same air, do they not live and die just as we
do?" Q^he blows, the broken limbs, the clanking
chains, the stinted food of the ergastula or slave-
prisons, excited all Seneca's compassion, and in all
probability presented a picture^f misery which the
world has rarely seen surpassed^ unless it were in
that nefarious trade which Engfand to her shame
once practised, and, to her eternal glory, resolutely
swept away.

But Seneca's inculcation of tenderness towards
slaves was in reality one of the most original of his
moral teachings ; and, from all that we know of Roman
life, it is to be feared that the number of those who
acted in accordance with it was small. Certainly
Epaphroditus, the master of Epictetus, was not one
of them. The historical facts which we know of this
man are slight. He was one of the four who accom-
panied the tragic and despicable flight of Nero from
Rome in the year 69, and when, after many waverings
of cowardice, Nero at last, under inmiinent peril of
being captured and executed, put the dagger to his

HIS LIFE, AND HOIV HE REGARDED IT. lOJ

breast, it was Epaphroditus who helped the tyrant to
drive it home into his heart, for which he was sub-
sequently banished, and iinally executed by the
Emperor Domitian.

Epictetus was accustomed to tell one or two anec-
dotes which, although given without comment, show
the narrowness and vulgarity of the man. Among
his slaves v/as a certain worthless cobbler named
Felicio ; as the cobbler was quite useless, Epaphro-
ditus sold him, and by some chance he was bought
by some one of Caesar's household, and made Caesar's
cobbler. Instantly Epaphroditus began to pay him
the profoundest respect, and to address him in the
most endearing terms, so that if any one asked what
Epaphroditus was doing, the. answer, as likely as not,
would be, " He is holding an important consultation
with Felicio."

On one occasion, some one came to him bewailing,
and weeping, and embracing his knees in a paroxysm
of grief, because of all his fortune little more than
50,000/. was left! "What did P2paphroditus do.?"
asks Epictetus; " did he laugh at the man as we did }
Not at all ; on the contrary, he exclaimed, in a tone of
commiseration and surprise, * Poor fellow ! how could
you possibly keep silence and endure such a mis-
fortune .? ' "

How brutally he could behave, and how little
respect he inspired, we may see in the following
anecdote. When Plautius Lateranus, the brave
nobleman whose execution during Piso's conspiracy
we liave already related, had received on hi.s n;:';k

192 EPICTETUS.

an ineffectual blow of the tribune's sword, Epaphro-
ditus, even at that dread moment, could not abstain
from pressing him with questions. The only reply
which he received from the dying man was the con-
temptuous remark, "Should I wish to say anything,
I will say It (not to a slave like you, but) to your
master^

Under a man of this calibre it is hardly likely that
a lame Phrygian boy would experience much kind-
ness. An anecdote, indeed, has been handed down to
us by several writers, which would show that he was
treated with atrocious cruelty. Epaphroditus, it is
said, once gratified his cruelty by twisting his slave's
leg in some instrument of torture. " If you go on,
you will break it," said Epictetus. The wretch did
go on, and did break it. " I told you that you would
break it," said Epictetus quietly, not giving vent to
his anguish by a single word or a single groan.
Stories of heroism no less triumphant have been au-
thenticated both in ancient and modern times ; but
we may hope for the sake of human nature that this
story is false, since another authority tells us that
Epictetus became lame in consequence of a natural
disease. Be that however as it may, some of the
early writers against Christianity — such, for instance,
as the physician Celsus — were fond of adducing this
anecdote in proof of a magnanimity which not even
Christianity could surpass ; to which use of the
anecdote Origen opposed the awful silence of our
Saviour upon the cross, and Gregory of Nazianzen
pointed out that, though it was a noble thing to

H/S LIFE, AND HO IV HE REGARDED IT. 193

cnriure inevitable evils, it was yet more noble to
uridefi?o them volaiitarily with an equal fortitude.
But. even if Epaphroditus were not guilty of breaking
the leg of Epictetus, it is clear thatQlie life of the
poor youth was surrounded by circumstances of the
most depressing and miserable character; circum-
stances which would have forced an ordinary man
to the low and animal level of existence which appears
to hav^e contented the great majority of Roman slavep
Some of the passages in which he speaks about the
consideration due to this unhappy class show a very
tender feeling towards them. " It would be best,"
he says, " if, both while making your preparations
and while feasting at your banquets, you distribute
among the attendants some of the provisions. But if
such a plan, at any particular time, be difficult to
carry out, remember that you who are not fatigued
are being waited upon by those who are fatigued ;
you who are eating and drinking by those who are
not eating and drinking ; you who are conversing by
those who are mute ; you who are at your ease by
people under painful constraint. And thus you will
neither yourself be kindled into unseemly passion,
nor will you in a fit of fury do harm to any one else."
No doubt Epictetus is here describing conduct which
he had often seen, and of which he had himself expe-
rienced the degradation. \But he had early acquired
a loftiness of soul and an insight into truth which
enabled him to distinguish tlie substance from tiie
sfiadow, to separate the realities of }ife item its
"^ accidents, and so to turn nis very misiortuiies into

1Q4 EPICTETUS.

fresh means of attaining to moral nohiiitvy in nroof
of this let us see some of his own opmions as to his
sta*e of Hfe.

^\t the very beginning of his Discoin'ses he draws a
distinction between the things which the gods havt
and the things which they have not put in our own
power, and he held (being deficient here in that Hght
which Christianity might have furnished to him) that
the blessings denied to us are denied not because the
gods mould not, but because they could not grant them
to us^ And then he supposes that Jupiter addresses
him :; —

" C Epictetus, had it been possible, I would have
made both your little body and your little property
free and unentangled ; but now, do not be mistaken,
it is not yours at all, but only clay finely kneaded.
Since, however, I could not do this/l gave you a por-
tion of ourselves, namely, this power of pursuing and
avoiding, of desiring and of declining, and generally
the power o! dealing with appearances : and if you
cultivate this pov/er, and regard it as that which
constitutes your real possession, you will never be
hindered or impeded, nor will you groan or find
fault with, or flatter any oiieT) Do these advantages
then appear to you to be trifling ? Heaven forbid !
Be content therefore with these, and thank the
^ods."

And again in one of his Fragments (viii. ix.) : —
" Freedom and slaven^' are but names, respectively,
of virtue and of vice : and botn of them depend upon
the will. But neither of them have anything to do

HIS LIFE, AND HOW HE REGARDED IT. 195

with those things in which the will has no share. For
no one is a slave whose will is free."

" Fortune is an evil bond of the body, vice of the
soul ; for he is a slave whose body is free but whose
soul is bound, and, on the contrary, he is free whose
body is bound but whose soul is free."

Who does not catch in these passages the very tone
of St. Paul when he says, " He that is called in the
Lord, being a servant, is the Lord's freeman : likewise
also he that is called, being free, is Christ's servant .'*"

Nor is his independence less clearly expressed when
he speaks of his deformity. Being but the deformity
of a body which he despised, he spoke of himself as
'fan ethereal existence staggering under the burden of
a corps^" In his admirable chapter on Contentment,
he very forcibly lays down that topic of consolation
which is derived from the sense that " the universe is
not made for our individual satisfaction." " Must my
leg be lamef he supposes some querulous objector to
inquire. " Slave!" he replies, "do you then because
of one miserable little leg find fault with the universe }
Will you not concede that accident to the existence of
general laws 1 Will you not dismiss the thought of it ?
Will you not cheerfully assent to it for the sake of him
who gave it } And will you be indignant and dis-
pleased at the ordinances of Zeus, which he ordained
and appointed with the Destinies, who were present
and wove the web of your being } Know you not what
an atom you are compared with the whole } — that is,
as regards your body, since as regards your reason
you are no whit inferior to, or less than, the gods
14 3 2

iq6 EPICTETUS.

For the greatness of reason is not estimated by size
or height, but by the doctrines which it embraces. Will
you not then lay up your treasure in those matters
wherein you are equal to the gods ? " And, thanks to
such principles, a poor and persecuted slave was able
to raise his voice in sincere and eloquent thanks-
n-ivincf to that God to whom he owed his " creation,
preservation, and all the blessings of this life."

Speaking of the multitude of our natural gifts, he
says, " Are these the only gifts of Providence towards
us } Nay, what power of speech suffices adequately
to praise, or to set them forth .? for, had we but true
intelligence, what duty would be more perpetually
incumbent on us than both in public and in private
to hymn the Divine, and bless His name and praise
His benefits .'' Ought we not, when we dig, and
when we plough, and when we eat, to sing this hymm
to God } ' Great is God, because He hath given us
these implements whereby we may till the soil ; great
is God, because He hath given us hands, and the means
of nourishment by food, and insensible growth, and
breathing sleep ;' these things in each particular we
ought to hymn, and to chant the greatest and the
divinest hymn because He hath given us the power
to appreciate these blessings, and continuously to use
them. What then .'' Since the most of you are
blinded, ought there not to be some one to fulfil this
province for you, and on behalf of all to sing his
hymn to God .'* And what else can / do, who am a
lame old man, except sing praises to God t Now, had
I been a nightingale, I should have sung the songs cf

HIS LIFE, AND HO IV HE REGARDED IT. 1^7

a nightingale, or had I been a swan the songs of a
swan ; but, being a reasonable being, it is my duty to
hymn God. This is my task, and I accomplish it;
nor, so far as may be granted to me, will I ever
abandon this post, and you also do I exhort to this
same song."

There is an almost lyric beauty about these ex-
pressions of resignation and faith in God, and it is the
utterance of such warm feelinirs towards Divine Pro-
vidence that constitutes the chief originality of Epic-
tetus. It is interesting to think that the oppressed
heathen philosopher found the same consolation, and
enjoyed the same contentment, as the persecuted
Christian Apostle. " Whether ye eat ,or drink," says
St. Paul, " or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of
God." " Think of God," says Epictetus, *' oftener
than you breathe. Let discourse of God be renewed
daily more surely than your food."

Here, again, are his views about his poverty
{Fragment xix.) : —

" Examine yourself whether you wish to be rich or
to be happy ; and if you wish to be rich, know that it
neither is a blessing, nor is it altogether in your own
power ; (out, if to be happy, know that it both is a
blessing, and is in your own power ; since the former
is but a temporary loan of fortune, but the gift of
happiness depends upon the will/

"Just as when you see a viper, or an asp, or a
scorpion, in a casket of ivory or gold, you do not love
or congratulate them on the splendour of their ma-
terial, but because their nature is pernicious you tn»n

19? EPICTETUS,

from and loathe them, so likewise when you see vice
enshrined in wealth and the pomp of circumstance do
not be astounded at the glory of its surroundings, but
despise the meanness of its character."

" Wealth is not among the number of good things ;
extravagance is among the number of evils, sober-
mindedness of good things.. Now sober-mindedness
invites us to frugality and the acquisition of real
advantages ; but wealth to extravagance, and it drags
us away from sober-mindedness. It is a hard matter,
therefore, being rich to be sober-minded, or being
sober-minded to be rich."

The Idst sentence will forcibly remind the reader of
our Lord's own words, " How hardly shall they that
have riches (or as the parallel passage less startlingly
expresses it, '* Children, how hard is it for them that
tnist in riches to ") enter into the kingdom of God."

But this is a favourite subject with the ancient
philosopher, and Epictetus continues : —

"/Wad you been born in Persia, you would not have
been eager to live in Greece, but to stay \\'here you
were, and be happy ; and, being born in poverty, why
are you eager to be rich, and not rather to abide in
poverty, and so be happy W

" As it is better to be iri good health, being hard-
pressed on a little truckle-bed, than to roll, and to be
ill in some broad couch ; eo too it is better in a small
competence to enjoy the oalm ' of moderate desires,
than in the midst of superfluities to be discontented."]

This, too, is a thought which many have expressed.
" Gentle sleep," says Horace, " despises not the

HIS LIFE, AND HOW HE REGARDED IT 199

humble cottages of rustics, nor the shaded banks, nor
valleys whose foliage waves with the western wind ;"
and every reader will recall the magnificent words of
our own great Shakespeare —

" Why rather, Sleep, liest thou in smolcv cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee.
And hush'd with buzzing nightflies to thj' slumber,
Than in the perfumed chambers of the great.
Under the canopies of costly state.
And lull'd with sounds of sweetest melody ? "

To the subject of freedom, and to the power which
man possesses to make himself entirely independent
of all surrounding circumstances, Epictetus inces-
santly recurs. With the possibility of banishment to
an crgastiiliun perpetually before his eyes, he defines
a prison as being any situation in which a man is
placed against his will ; to Socrates for instance
the prison was no prison, for he was there willingly,
and no man need be in prison against his will if he
has learnt, as one of his primary duties, a cheerful
acquiescence in the inevitable. By the expression ot
such sentiments Epictetus had anticipated by fifteen
hundred years, the immortal truth so sweetly ex-
pressed by Lovelace :

" Stone lihills do not a prisoii make.
Nor iron bars a cai^e ;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for a hermitage."

Situated as he was, we can hardly wonder that
thoughts like these occupied a large share of the
mind of Epictetus, or that he had taught himself to

^>

f

200 EPICTETUS.

lay hold of them with the firmest possible grasp.
When asked, " Who among men is rich ? " he
replied, "He who suffices for himself;" an expres-
sion which contains the germ of the truth so forcibly-
expressed in the Book of Proverbs, "The backslider
in heart shall be filled with his own ways, and a good
man shall be satisfied from himself !' Similarly, when
asked, \Who is freeJ " he replies, " The man who
masters his own self/O with much the same tone of
expression as that or Solomon, "He that is slow to
anger is better than the mighty, and he that ruleth
his spirit than he that taketh a city." Socrates was
one of the great models whom Epictetus constantly
sets before him, and this is one of the anecdotes
which he relates about him with admiration. When
Archelaus sent a message to express the intention of
making him rich, Socrates bade the messenger inform
him that at Athens four quarts of meal might be
bought for three halfpence, and the fountains flow
with water. "If then my existing possessions are in-
sufficient for me, at any rate I am sufficient for them,
and so they too are sufficient for me. Do you not
see that Polus acted the part of CEdipus in his royal
state with no less beauty of voice than that of CEdipus
in Colonos, a wanderer and beggar .'' Shall then a
noble man appear inferior to Polus, so as not to act
well every character imposed upon him by Divine
Providence ; and shall he not imitate Ulysses, who
even in rags was wo less conspicuous than in the
curled nap of his purple cloak } "

Generally speaking, the view which Epictetus took

HIS LIFE, AND 110 IV HE REGARDED IT. 201

of life is always simple, and always consistent ; it is
a view which gave him consolation among life's
troubles, and strength to display some of its noblest
virtues, and it may be summed up in the following-
passages of his famous Manual : —

" Remember," he says, " tliat you are an actor of
just such a part as is assigned you by the Poet of the
play ; of a short part, if the part be short ; of a long
part, if it be long. Should He wish you to act the
part of a beggar, take care to act it naturally and
nobly ; and the same if it be the part of a lame man,
or a ruler, or a private man ; Qor tJds is in your power,
to act well the part assigned to ^u ; but to choose
that part is the function of another/j

" Let not these considerations afflict you : ' I shall
live despised, and the merest nobody ; ' for if dishonour
be an evil, you cannot be involved in evil any more
than you can be involved in baseness through any one
else's means. Is it then at all yoitr business to be
a leading man, or to be entertained at a banquet ?
By no means. How then can it be a dishonour not
to be so } And how will you be a mere nobody,
since it is your duty to be somebody only in those
circumstances which are in your own power, in which
you may be a person of the greatest importance .'*"

** Honour, precedence, confidence," he argues in
another passage, " whether they be good things or
evil things, are at any rate things for which their own
definite price must be paid. Lettuces are sold for a
p-enn>, and if ycu want your lettuce you must pay
your penny ; and similarly, if you want to be abided

202 EPTCTETUS.

out to a person's house, you must pay the price which
he demands for asking people, whether the coin he
rec]uires be praise or attention ; but if you do not give
these, do not expect the other. Have you then
gained nothing in heu of your supper ? Indeed
you have ; you have escaped praising a person whom
you did not want to praise, and you have escaped the
necessity of tolerating the upstart impertinence of his
menials."

Some parts of this last thought have been so
beautifully expressed by the American poet Lowell
that I will conclude this chapter in his words :

" Earth hath her price for what earth gives us ;

The beggar is tax'd for a corner to die in ;
The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives ii> ;

We bargain for the graves we he in :
At the devil's mart are all things sold,
Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold,
I'or a cap and bells our lives we pay.

Bubbles we earn with our whole soul's taskingj,
^Tis only God that is given away,

*Tis only heaven may V nadfcr the asking.^'*

CHAPTER II.

LIFE AND VIEWS OF EPICTETUS [contintied).

Whether any of these great thoughts would have
suggested themselves spontaiieoitsly to Epictetus —
whether there was an inborn wisdom and nobleness in
the mind of this slave which would have enabled him
to elaborate such views from his own consciousness,
we cannot tell ; they do not, however, express Jiis
sentiments only, but belong in fact to the moral
teaching of the great Stoic school, in the doctrines of
which he had received instruction.

It may sound strange to the reader that one
situated as Epictetus was should yet have had a
regular tutor to train him in Stoic doctrines. That
such should have been the case appears at first sight
inconsistent with the cruelty w^th which he was
treated, but it is a fact which is capable of easy ex-
planation. In times of universal luxury and display
— in times when a sort of surface-refinement is found
among all the wealthy — some sort of respect is always
paid to intellectual eminence, and intellectual amuse-
ments are cultivated as well as those of a coarser
character. Hence a rich Roman liked to Jiave people

204 EPICTETUS.

of literary culture among his slaves ; he liked to have
people at hand who would get him any information
which he might desire about books, who could act as
his amanuenses, who could even correct and supply
information for his original compositions. Such
learned slaves formed part of every large establish-
ment, and among" them were usually to be found
some who bore, if they did not particularly merit, the
title of '' philosophers." These men — many of whom
are described as having been mere impostors, osten-
tatious pedants, or ignorant hypocrites — acted some-
what like domestic chaplains in the houses of their
patrons. They gratified an amateur taste for wisdom,
and helped to while away in comparative innocence
the hours which their masters might otherv^ise have
spent in lassitude or sleep. It was no more to the
credit of Epaphroditus that he wished to have a
philosophic slave, than it is to the credit of an illiterate
millionaire in modern times that he likes to have
works of high art in his dravving-n^om, and books of
reference in his well-furnished library.

Accordingly, since Epictetus must have been sin-
gularly useless for all physical purposes, and since
his thoughtfulness and intelligence could not fail to
command attention, his master determined to make
him useful in the only way possible, and sent him to
Caius Musonius Rufus to be trained in the doctrines
of the Stoic philosophy.

Musonius was the son of a Roman knight. His
learning and eloquence, no less than his keen appre-
ciation of Stoic truths, had so deeply kindled the

HIS LIFE AND VIEWS. 205

suspicions of Nero, that he banished him to the rocky
little island of Gyaros, on the charge of his having
been concerned in Piso's conspiracy. He returned to
Rome after tlie suicide of Nero, and lived in great
distinction and respect, so that he was allowed to
remain in the city when the Emperor Vespasian
banished all the other philosophers of any eminence.

The works of Musonius have not come down to us,
but a few notices of him, which are scattered in the
Discourses of his greater pupil, show us what kind of
man he was. The following anecdotes will show that
he was a philosopher of the strictest school.

Speaking of the value of logic as a means of train-
ing the reason, Epictetus anticipates the objection
that, after all, a mere error in reasoning is no very
serious fault. He points out that it is a fault, and
that is sufficient. " I too," he says, " once made this
very remark to Rufus when he rebuked me for not
discovering the suppressed premiss in some syllogism.
'What!' said I, 'have I then set the Capitol on fire,
that you rebuke me thus >. ' ' Slave ! " he answered ;
' what has the Capitol to do with it } Is there no
otJier fault then short of setting the Capitol on fire.?
Yes ! to use one's own mere fancies rashly, at random,
anyhow ; not to follow an argument, or a demon-
stration, or a sophism ; not, in short, to see what
makes for oneself or not, in questioning and answerinfTf
— is none of these things a fault ? ' "

Sometimes he used to test the Stoical endurance of
his pupil by pointing out the indignities and tortures
which his master might at any moment inflict upon

^o6 EPICTETUS.

bim ; and when Epictetus answered that, after all,
such treatment was what man had borne, and there-
fore could bear, he would reply approvingly that every
man's destiny was in his own hands ; that he need
lack nothing from any one else ; that, since he could
derive from himself magnanimity and nobility of
soul, he might despise the notion of receiving lands
or money or office. ** But," he continued, "when any
one is cowardly or mean, one ought obviously in
writing letters about such a person to speak of him
as a corpse, and to say, * Favour us with the corpse
and blood of So-and-so.' For, in fact; such a man is
a mere corpse, and nothing more ; for if he were any-
thing more, he would have perceived that no man
ever suffers any real misfortunes by another's means."
I do not know whether Mr. Ruskin is a student of
Epictetus, but he, among others, has forcibly expressed
the same truth. " My friends, do you remember that
old Scythian custom, when the head of a house died }
How he was dressed in his finest dress, and set in his
chariot, and carried about to his friends' houses ; and
each of them placed him at his table's head, and all
feasted in his presence.-* Suppose it were offered to
3'ou, in plain words, as it is offered to you in dire
facts, that you should gain this Scythian honour

gradually, while you yet thought yourself alive

Would you take the offer verbally made by the death-
angel ? Would the meanest among us take it, think
you ? Yet practically and verily we grasp at it,
every one of us., in a measure ; many of us grasp at
it ill the fulness of horror."

HIS LIFE AND VIEWS. 207

The way in which Musonius treated would-be
pupils much resembled the plan adopted by Socrates.
" It is not easy," says Epictetus, ** to train effeminate
youths, any more than it is easy to take up whey
with a hook. But those of fine nature, even if you
discourage them, desire instruction all the more. For
which reason Rufus often discouraged pupils, using
this as a criterion of fine and of common natures ; for
he used to say, that just as a stone, even if you fling
it into the air, will fall down to the earth by its own
gravitating force, so also a noble nature, in proportion
as it is repulsed, in that proportion tends more in its
own natural direction." As Emerson says, —

" Yet on the nimble air benign

Speed nimbler messages,
That waft the breath of grace divine

To hearts in sloth and ease.
So nigh is grandeur to our dust.

So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, *Thou MUST,*

The youth replies, ' I can.' "

One more trait of the character of Musonius will
show how deeply Epictetus respected him, and how
much good he derived from him. In his Discourse
on Ostentation, Epictetus says that Rufus was in
the habit of remarking to his pupils, " If you have
leisure to praise me, I can have done you no good."
" He used indeed so to address us that each one of
us, sitting there, thought that some one had been
privately telling tales against Jiim in particular, so
completely did Rufus seize hold of his characteristics,
so vividly did he portray our individual faults."

2o8 El'lCTETUS.

r*^^Such was the man under whose teaching Epictetus
{jrew to maturity, and it was evidently a teaching
which was wise and, noble, even if it were somewhat
chilling and austere. It formed an epoch in the
slave's life ; it remoulded his entire character ; it was
to him the source of blessings so inestimable in their
value that it is doubtful whether they were counter-
balanced by all the miseries of poverty, slavery, and
contempt. He would probably have admitted that
it was better for him to have been sold into cruel
slavery, than it would have been to grow up in
freedom, obscurity, and ignorance in his native
Hierapolis. So that Epictetus might have found, and
did find, in his own person, an additional argument
in favour of Divine Providence : an additional proof
that God is kind and merciful to all men ;\an addi-
tional intensity of conviction that, if our lots on earth
are not equal, they are at least dominated by a prin-
ciple of justice and of wisdom, and each man, on the
whole, may gain that which is best for him, and that
which most honestly and most heartily he desires)
Epictetus reminds us again and again that we may
have many, if not all, such advantages as the world
has to offer, if we are willing to pay the price by ivJiick
they are obtained. But if that price be a mean or a
wicked one, and if we should scorn ourselves were we
ever tempted to pay it, then we must not even cast one
longing look of regret towards things which can only
be got by that which we deliberately refuse to give.
^3vyery good and just man may gain^if nx^t happiness,
tne^something higher than happines^ Let no one

HIS LIFE AND VIEWS. 209

regard this as a mere phrase, for it is capable of a
most distinct and definite meaning. There are certain
things which all men desire, and which all men
would ^/^fl?/y, if they could lawftdly and innocently
obtain. These thir»gs are health, wealth, ease, com-
fort, influence, honour, freedom from opposition and
from pain ; and yet, if you were to place all these bles-
sings on the one side, and on the other side to place
poverty, and disease, and anguish, and trouble, and
contempt, — yet, if on this side also you were to place
truth and justice, and a sense that, however densely
the clouds may gather about our life, the light of God
will be visible beyond them, all the noblest men who
ever lived would choose, as without hesitation they
always have chosen, the latter destiny. It is not
that they like failure, but they prefer failure to falsity ;
it is not that they love persecution, but they prefer
persecution to meanness ; it is not that they relish
opposition, but they welcome opposition rather than
guilty acquiescence ; it is not that they do not shrink
from agony, but they would not escape agony by crime.
The selfishness of Dives in his purple is to them less
enviable than the innocence of Lazarus in rags ; they
would be chained with John in prison rather than loll
with Herod at the feast ; they would fight with beasts
with Paul in the arena rather than be steeped in the foul
luxury of Nero on the throne. It is not happiness, but
it is something higher than happiness; it is stillness, it
is assurance, it is satisfaction, it is peace ; the world can
neither understand it, nor give it, nor take it away, —
it is something indescribabic — it is the gift of God

2IO EPiCTETUS,

" The fallacy " of being surprised at wickedness in
prosperity, and righteousness in misery, " can only
lie," says Mr. Froude, in words which would have
dehghted Epictetus, and which would express the
inmost spirit of his philosophy, *' in the supposed
rigJU to happiness. . . . Happiness is not what we
are to look for. Our place is to be true to the best
we know, to seek that, and do that ; and if by 'virtue
is its own reward ' be meant that the good man cares
only to continue good, desiring nothing more, then
it is a true and a noble saying. . . . Let us do
right, and then whether happiness come, or unhap-
piness, it is no very mighty matter. If it come, life
will be sweet ; if it do not come, life will be bitter
— bitter, not sweet, and yet to be borne. . . . The
well-being of our souls depends only on what we
are :■ and nobleness of character is nothing else but
steady love of good ^ and steady scorn of evil. . . .Only
to those who have the heart to say, * We can do
without selfish enjoyment : it is not what we ask
or desire/ is there no secret. Man will have what he
desires, and will find what is really best for him,
exactly as he honestly seeks for it. Happiness may
-fly away^ pleasure pall or cease to be obtainablcy
wealth decay ^ friends fail or prove unkind : but the
-power to serve God never fails ^ and the love oj
Him is never rejected.

CHAPTER ill.

LIFE AND VIEWS OF EPICTETUS {continued)

Of the life of Epictetus, as distinct from his opin-
ions, there is unfortunately little more to be told.
The life of

" That halting slave, who in Nicopolis
Taught Arrian, when Vespasian's brutal son
Cleared Rome of what most shamed him,"

is not an eventful life, and the conditions which sur-
rounded it are very circumscribed. Great men, it
has been observed, have often the shortest biogra-
phies ; their real life is in their books.

At some period of his life, but how or when we do
not know, Epictetus was manumitted by his master,
and was henceforward regarded by the world as free.
Probably the change made little or no difference in
his life. If it saved him from a certain amount of
brutahty, if it gave him more uninterrupted leisure, it
probably did not in the slightest degree modify the
hardships of his existence, and may have caused him
some little anxiety as ta the means of procuring
the necessaries of life, f He^ of all men, would have
attached the least impuTfancc to the external con-
ditions under which he lived ; he always regarded

212 EPICTETUS.

them as falling under the category of things which
lay beyond the sphere of his own influence, and
therefore as things with which he had nothing to doJ
Even in his most oppressed days, he considered him-
self, by the grace of heaven, to be more free — free in
a far truer and higher sense — than thousands of those
who owed allegiance to no master's will. Whether
he had saved any small sum of money, or whether
his needs were supplied by the many who loved anr^
honoured him, we do not know. He was a man who
vvas content with the barest necessaries of life, and
we may be sure that he would have refused to be
indebted to any one for more than thes^

Qt is probable that he never marriea\ This may
have been due to that shade of indifference to the
female character of which we detect traces here and
there in his writings. In one passage he complains
that women seemed to think of nothing but admira-
tion and getting married ; and, in another, he observes,
almor.t with a sneer, that the Roman ladies Wr^re iond
of Plato's Republic because he allowed some very
liberal marriage regulations. We can only infer from
these passages that he had been very untortunate in
the specimens of women with whom he had been
thrown. The Roman ladies of his time were certainly
not models of character ; he was not likely to fall
in with very exalted females among the slaves of
Epaphroditus or the ladies of his family, and he had
probably never known the love of a sister or. a
mother's care. He did not, however, go the length of
condemning marriage altogether; on the contrary, he

HIS LIFE AND VIEWS. 21

blames the philosophers who did so. vj^ut it is equally
obvious that he approves of celibacy as a " counsel of
perfection,'^nd indeed his views on the subject have
so close and remarkable a resemblance to those of
St. Paul, that our readers will be interested in seeing
them side by side.

In I Cor. vii. St. Paul, after speaking of the noble-
ness of virginity, proceeds, nevertheless, to sanction
matrimony as in itself a hallowed and honourable
estate. It was not given to all, he says, to abide
even as he was, and therefore marriage should be
adopted as a sacred and indissoluble bond. Still,
without being sure that he has any divine sanction for
what he is about to say, he considers celibacy good
" for the present distress," and warns those that marry
that they "shall have trouble in the flesh." For mar-
riage involves a direct multiplication of the cares of
the flesh : " He that is unmarried careth for the things
that belong to the Lord, how he may please the
Lord : but he that is married careth for the things
that are of the world, how he may please his wife.
.... And this I speak for your own profit, not
that I may cast a snare upon you, but for that zu/nck
is comply y and that yc may attend npon the Lord
zuithotit distraction.''

It is clear, then, that St. Paul regarded virginity as a
" counsel of perfection," and Epictetus uses respecting
it almost identically the same language. Marriage
was perfectly permissible in his view, but it was much
better for a Cynic {i.e. for all who carried out most
fully their philosophical obligations) to remain single :

214 EPICTETUS.

" Since the condition of things is such as it now is.
as though we were on the eve of battle, ought fwt
tJie Cynic to be entirely zuitJiont distractio)i " [the Greek
word being the very same as that used by St. Paul]
^^for the service of God? ought he not to be able to
move about among mankind free from the entangle-
ment of private relationships or domestic duties,
which if he neglect he will no longer preserve the
character of a wise and good man, and which if he
observe he will lose the function of a messenger, and
sentinel, and herald of the gods?" Epictetus pro-
ceeds to point out that if he is married he can no
longer look after the spiritual interests of all with
whom he is thrown in contact, and no longer maintain
the rigid independence of all luxuries which marked
the genuine philosopher. He 7nust, for instance, have
a bath for his child, provisions for his wife's ailments,
and clothes for his little ones, and money to buy them
satchels and pens, and cribs and cups ; and hence a
general increase of furniture, and all sorts of undigni-
fied distractions, which Epictetus enumerates with an
almost amusing manifestation of disgust It is true
(he admits) that Crates, a celebrated cynic, was mar-
ried, but it was to a lady as self-denying as himself,
and to one who had given up wealth and friends to
share hardship and poverty with him. And, if
Epictetus does not venture to say in so many words
that Crates in this matter made a mistake, he takes
pains to point out that the circumstances were far too
exceptional to be accepted as a precedent for the
imitation of others.

MIS LI-E AND VIEWS. 215

VBut," inquires the interlocutor, "how then is the
wond to get on ? " The question seems quite to
disturb the bachelor equanimity of Epictetus ; it
makes- him use language of the strongest and most
energetic contempt : and it is only when he trenches
on this subject that he ever seems to lose the nobility
and grace, the '* sweetness and light," which are the
general characteristic of his utterances. In spite of
his complete self-mastery he was evidently a man ot
strong feelings, and with a natural tendency to ex-
press them strongly. ** Heaven bless us," he exclaims
in reply, " are they greater benefactors of mankind who
bring into the world two or three evilly-squalling
brats,* or those who, to the best of their power, keep
a beneficent eye on the lives, and habits, and ten-
dencies of all mankind ? Were the Thebans who had
large families more useful to their country than the
childless Epaminondas ; or was Homer less useful to
mankind than Priam with his fifty good-for-nothing
sons ? . . . . Why, sir, the true cynic is a father to'
all men ; all men are his sons and all women his
daughters ; he has a bond of union, a lien of affection
with them all. 'A {Dissert, iii. 22.)

The whole-xharactcr of Epictetus is sufficient to
prove that he would only do what he considered most
desirable and most exalted ; and passages like these,
the extreme asperity of which I have necessarily

* /co>c(ippv7X« ''■°"^'*- Another reading is Ko»c(ipj<yx«> wliich M. Mar-
tha renders, '^'^ Marmots a vilain petit muscau!" It is evident that
Epictetus did not like children, which makes his subsequently men-
tioned compassion to the poor neglected child still more creditable
to him.

U

9\6 EPICTETUS,

softened down, are, I think, decisive in favour of
the tradition which pronounces him to have been
unmarried.

We are told that he Hved in a cottage of the
simplest and even meanest description : it neither
needed nor possessed a fastening of any kind, for
within it there was no furniture except a lamp and
the poor straw pallet on which he slept. About his
lamp there was current in antiquity a famous story, to
which he himself alludes. As a piece of unwonted
luxur}^ he had purchased a little iron lamp, which
burned in front of the images of his household deities.
It Vv^as the only possession which he had, and a thief
stole it. " He will be finely disappointed when he
com.es again," quietly observed Epictetus, " for he
will only find an earthenware lamp next time." At
his death the little earthenware lamp was bought by
some genuine hero-worshipper for 3,000 drachmas.
" The purchaser hoped," says the satirical Lucian,
" that if he read philosophy at night by that lamp, he
would at once acquire in dreams the wisdom of thi
admirable old man who once possessed it."

But, in spite of his deep poverty, it must not be
supposed that there was anything eccentric or osten-
tatious in the life of Epictetus. On the contrary, his
writings abound in directions as to the proper bearing
of a philosopher in life. He warns his students that
they may have ridicule to endure. Not only did the
little boys in the streets, the gamins of Rome, appear
to consider a philosopher " fair game," and think it
fine fun to mimic his gestures and pull his beard, but

HJS LIFE AND VIEWS. 217

he had to undergo the sneers of much more dignified
people, "If," says Epictetus, *• you want to know
how the Romans regard philosophers, listen. Maelius,
who had the highest philosophic reputation among
them, once when I was present, happened to get into
a great rage with his people, and as though he had
received an intolerable injury, exclaimed, ' I cannot
endure it ; you are killing me ; why, you'll make me
like hhnP pointing to me," evidently as if Epictetus
were tiie merest insect in existence. And, again lu:
says in the Manual: " If you wish to be a philosopher,
prepare yourself to be thoroughly laughed at since
many will certainly sneer and jeer at you, and will
say, * He has come back to us as a philosopher all of
a sudden,' and 'Where in the world did he get this
superciliousness .'* ' Now do not you be supercilious,
but cling to the things which appear best to you in
such a manner as though you were conscious of
having been appointed by God to this position."
Again in the little discourse On tJie Desire oj
Adjniratiojt, he warns the philosopher "not to ivalk
as if he had sivallowed a poker" or to care for the
applause of those multitudes whom he holds to be
immersed in error. For all display, and pretence,
and hypocrisy, and Pharisaism, and boasting, and
mere fruitless book-learning he seems to have felt a
genuine and profound contempt. Recommendations to
simplicity of conduct, courtesy of manner, and modera-
tion of language were among his practical precepts.
It is refreshing, too, to know that with the sirongest
and manliest good sense, he entirely repudiated that

2i8 . EPICTETUS.

dog-like brutality of behaviour, and repulsive eccen-
tricity of self-neglect, which characterised not a few
of the Cynic leaders. He expressly argues that the
Cynic should be a man of ready tact, and attractive
presence ; and there is something of almost indignant
energy in his words when he urges upon a pupil the
plain duty of scrupulous cleanliness. In this respect
our friends the Hermits would not quite have satisfied
him, although he might possibly have pardoned them
on the plea that they abode in desert solitudes, since
he bids those who neglect the due care of their bodies
to live " either in the wilderness or alone."

u^ate in life Epictetus increased his establishment
by taking in an old woman as a servant.^ The cause
of his doing so shows an almost Christian tenderness
of character. (According to the hideous custom of in-
fanticide whicK^revaiied in the pagan world, a man
with whom Epictetus was acquainted exposed his
infant son to perish. Epictetus in pity took the child
home to save its life, and the services of a female were
necessary to supply its wantsA Such kindness and
self-denial were all the more admirable because pity,
like all other deep emotions, was regarded by the
Stoics in the light rather of a vice than of a virtue.
In this respect, however, both Seneca and Epictetus,
and to a still greater extent Marcus Aurelius, were
gloriously false to the rigidity of the school to
which they professed to belong. We see with delight
that one of the Discourses of Epictetus was On the
Tenderness and Forbearance due to Sinners ; and he
abounds in exhortations to forbearance in judging

HIS LIFE AND VIEWS. 219

others. In one of his Fragments he tells the follow-
ing anecdote : — A person who had seen a poor ship-
wrecked and almost dying pirate took pity on him,
carried him home, gave him clothes, and furnished
him with all the necessaries of life. Som.ebody
reproached him for doing good to the wicked — *' I
nave honoured," he replied, "not the man, but
humanity in his person."

But one fact more is known in the life of Epictetus.
Domitian, the younger son of Vespasian, succeeded
his far nobler brother the Emperor Titus ; and in the
course of his reign a decree was passed which
banished all the philosophers from Italy. Epictetus
was not exempted from this unjust and absurd decree.
That he bore it with equanimity may be inferred from
the approval with which he tells an anecdote about
Agrippinus, who while his cause was being tried in the
Senate went on with all his usual avocations, and on
being informed on his return from bathing that he had
been condemned, quietly asked, *' To death or banish-
ment.?" " To banishment," said the messenger. " Is
my property confiscated.?" "No." "Very well, then
let us go as far as Aricia" (about sixteen miles from
Rome), " and dine there."

There was a certain class of philosophers whose
external mark and whose sole claim to distinction
rested in the length of their beards; and when the
decree of Domitian was passed these gentlemen con-
tented themselves with shaving. Epictetus alludes to
this in his second Discoi(rse,(^^CpmQ, Epictetus, shave
off your beard," he imagines some one to say to him.

u2

220 EPICTETUS.

** If I am a philosopher I will not," he replies. " Then
I will take off yoiii^ head." " By all means, if that will
do you any good^

He went to Nicopolis, a town of Epirus, which had
been built by Augustus in commemoration of his
victory at Actium. Whether he ever revisited Rome
is uncertain, but it is probable that he did so, for we
know that he enjoyed the friendship of several eminent
philosophers and statesmen, and was esteemed and
honoured by the Emperor Hadrian himself He is
said to have lived to a good old age, surrounded by
affectionate and eager disciples, and to have died with
the same noble simplicity which had marked his life.
The date of his death is as little known as that of his
birth. It only remains to give a sketch of those
thoughts which., poor though he was, and despised,
and a slave, yet made him "dear to the immortals."

CHAPTER IV.

THE "manual" and "FRAGMENTS" OF EPICTETUS.

It is nearly certain that Epictetus never committed
any of his doctrines to writing. Like his great ex-
emplar, Socrates, he contented himself with oral
instruction, and the bulk of what has come down to us
in his name consists in the Discoiuscs reproduced for
us by his pupil Arrian. It was the arnbition of Arrian
*' to be to Epictetus what Xenophon had been to
Socrates," that is, to hand down to posterity a noble
and faithful picture of the manner in which his master
had lived and taught. With this view, he wrote four
books on Epictetus ; — a life, which is now unhappily
lost ; a book of conversation or ** table-talk," which is
also lost ; and two books which have come down to
us, viz. the Discourses and the Manual. It is from
these two invaluable books, and from a good many
isolated fragments, that we are enabled to judge what
was the practical morality of Stoicism, as expounded
by the holy and upright slave.

The Manual is a kind of abstract of Epictetus's
ethical principles, which, with many additional illus-
trations and with more expansion, are also explained

222 EPICTETUS.

in the Discourses. Both books were so popular that
by their means Arrian first came into conspicuous
notice, and ultimately attained the highest eminence
and rank. The Manual was to antiquit}^ what the
Imttatio of Thomas a Kempis was to later times, and
what Woodhead's Whole Duty of Man or Wilberforce's
Practical View of Christianity have been to large
sections of modern Englishmen. It was a clear,
succinct, and practical statement of common daily
duties, and the principles upon which they rest. Ex-
pressed in a manner entirely simple and unornate, its
popularity was wholly due to the moral elevation of
the thoughts which it expressed. Epictetus did not
aim at style ; his one aim was to excite his hearers to
virtue, and Arrian tells us that in this endeavour he
created a deep impression by his manner and voice.
It is interesting to know that the Manual was widely
accepted among Christians no less than among Pagans,
and that, so late as the fifth century, paraphrases were
written of it for Christian use. No systematic treatise
of morals so simply beautiful was ever composed, and
to this day the best Christian may study it, not
with interest only, but with real advantage. It is like
the voice of the Sybil, which, uttering things simple,
and unperfumed, and unadorned, by God's grace
reacheth through innumerable years. We proceed to
give a short sketch of its contents.
pEpictetus began by laying down the broad compre-
hensive statement that there are some things which
are in our power, and depend upon ourselves ; other
things which are beyond our power, and wholly inde-

^L

HIS ''MANUAL" AND "FRAGMENTS." 223

pendent of us. The things which are in our power are
our opinions, our aims, our desires, our aversions — in
a word, o-iiractiojis. The things beyond our power are
bodily accidents, possessions, fame, rank, and what-
ever Hes beyond the sphere of our actions. To the
former of these classes of things our whole attention
must be confined. In that region we may be noble,
unperturbed, and free ; in the other we shall be
dependent, frustrated, querulous, miserable. Both
classes cannot be successfully attended to ; they are
antagonistic, antipathetic ; we cannot serve God and
Mammon.

Qn[ow, if we take a right view of all these things
which in no way depend on ourselves we shall regard
them as mere semblances — as shadows which are to
be distinguished from the true substance. We shall
not look upon them as fit subjects for aversion or desire.
Sin, and cruelty, and falsehood we may hate, because
we can avoid them if we w^ill ; but we must look upon
sickness, and poverty, and death as things which are
not fit subjects for our avoidance, because they lie
wholly beyond our controL)

This, then, — endurance of the inevitable, avoidance
of the evil — is the key-note of the Epictetean philo
sophy. It has been summed up in the three words,
^ kvk^ov KCLi airk^ov, " Sustine et abstine" " Bear an
forbear," — bear whatever God assigns to you, abstair
from that which He forbids. ^___

The earlier part of the Manual is devoted to
practical advice which may enable men to endure
nobly. For instance, "If there be anything," says

S2d EPICTETUS.

Epictetus, "which you highly vakie or tenderly love,
estimate at the same time its true nature. Is it some
possession ? remember that it may be destroyed. Is
it wife or child 1 remember that they may die."
" Death," says an epitaph in Chester Cathedral —

"Death, the great monitor, comes oft to prove,
'Tis dust we dote on, when 'tis man we love."

" Desire nothing" too much. If you are going to
the public baths and are annoyed or hindered by the
rudeness, the pushing, the abuse, the thievish propen-
sities of others, do not lose your temper /^remind
yourself that it is more important that you should
keep your will in harmony with nature than that you
should bathe. And so with all troubles ; men suffer
far less from the things themselves than from the
opinions they have of theni/

"If you cannot frame your circumstances in accord-
ance with your wishes, frame your will into harmony
with your circumstances.* When you lose the best
gifts of life, consider them as not lost but only resigned
to Him who gave them. You have a remedy in your
own heart against all trials — continence as a bulwark
against passion, patience against opposition, fortitude
against pain. Begin with trifles : if you are robbed,
remind yourself that your peace of mind is of more
value and importance than the thing wh-ich has been
stolen from you. Follow the guidance of nature ;
that is the great thing ; regret nothing, desire nothing,

* " When what thou wiliest befalls not, thou then must will what
befhlleth."

HIS " MANUAL " AND " FRAGMENTS." 225

which can disturb that end. Behave as at a banquet
— take with crratitude and in moderation what is set
before you, and seek for nothing more ;^^iigher and
diviner step will be to be ready and able to forego
even that wJiich is given you, or which you might
easily obtairy Sympathise with others, at least
externally, when they are in sorrow and misfortune ;
but remember in your own heart that to the brave
and wise and true there is really nu such thing as
misfortune ; it is but an ugly semblance ; the croak
of the raven can portend no harm to such a man,
he is elevated above its power.

" We do not choose our own parts in life, and have
nothing to do with those parts ; our simple duty is
confined to playing them well. The slave may be as
free as the consul ; and freedom is the chief of bless-
ings ; it dwarfs all others ; beside it all others are
insignificant, with it all others become needless, with-
out it no others are possible. No one can insult you
if you will not regard his v/ords or deeds as. insults.*
Keep your eye steadily fixed on the great reality of
death, and all other things will shrink to their true pro-
portions. As in a voyage, when the ship has come to
anchor, if you have gone out to find water, you may
amuse yourself with picking up a little shell or bulb,

* Compare Cowper's Conversation : —

" Am I to set my life upon a throw
Because a bear is rude and surly? — No. —
A modest, sensible, and well-bred man
Will not insult me, and no other can."

226 EPICTETUS.

but you must keep your attention steadily fixed upon
the ship, in case the captain should call, and then you
must leav'e all such things, lest you should be flune^
on board, bound like sheep. So in life ; if, instead of
a little shell or bulb, some wifeling or childling be
granted you, well and good ; but, if the captain call,
run to the ship and leave such possessions behind
you, not looking back. But if you be an old man,
take care not to go a long distance from the ship
at all, lest you should be called and come too late."
The metaphor is a significant one, and perhaps the
following lines of Sir Walter Scott, prefixed anony-
mously to one of the chapters of the Waverley
Novels, may help to throw light upon it :

" Death finds us 'midst our playthings ; snatches us,
As a cross nurse might do a wayward child,
From all our toys and baubles — the rough call
Unlooses all our favourite ties on earth :
And well if they are such as may be answered
In yonder world, where all is judged of truly,"

*' Preserve your just relations to other men ; their
misconduct does not affect your duties. Has your
father done wrong, or your brother been unjust 1
Still he is your father, he is your brother ; and you
must consider your relation to him, not whether he be
worthy of it or no.

V^^our duty towards the gods is to form just and
true opinions respecting them. Believe that they do
all things well, and then you need never murmur oi
complain^^'

///S "AfANiTAL" AND '' FRAGMENTSr 227

"(As rules of practice," says Epictetus, *' prescribe
to yourself an ideal, and then act up to it. Be mostly
silent ; or, if you converse, do not let it be about
vulgar and insignificant topics, such as dogs, horses,
racing, or prize-fighting. Avoid foolish and immo-
derate laughter, vulgar entertainments, impurity, dis-
play, spectacles, recitations, and all egotistical remarks.
Set before you the examples of the great and good.
Do not be dazzled by mere appearances. Do what
is right quite irrespective of what people will say or
think. Remember that your tK)dy is a very small
matter, and needs but very little/ just as all that the
foot needs is a shoe, and not a dazzling ornament of
gold, purple, or jewelled embroidery. To spend all
one's time on the body, or on bodily exercises, shows
a weak intellect. Do not be fond of criticising others,
and do not resent their criticisms of you. Every-
thing," he says, and this is one of his most charac-
teristic precepts, " has two handles ; one by which it
may be borne, the other by which it cannot. If your
brother be unjust, do not take up the matter by that
handle — the handle of his injustice — for that handle
is the one by which it cannot be taken up ; but
rather by the handle that he is your brother and
brought up with you ; and then you will be taking it
up as it can be borne."

All these precepts have a general application, but
Epictetus adds others on the right bearing of a plii
losopher; that is, of one whose professed ideal is
higher than the multitude. He bids him above

16 V

I2« EPICTEJVS.

all thing's not to be censorious, and not to he
ostentatious. " Feed on your own principles ; do
not throw them up to show how much you have
eaten. Be self-denying, but do not boast of it. Be in-
dependent and moderate, and regard not the opinion
or censure of others, but keep a watch upon your-
self as your own most dangerous enemy. Do
not plume yourself on an intellectual knowledge of
philosophy, which is in itself quite valueless, but on a
consistent nobleness of action. Never relax your
efforts, but aim at perfection. Let everything which
seems best be to you a law not to be transgressed ;
and whenever anything painful, or pleasurable, or
glorious, or inglorious, is set before you, remember
that no iv is the struggle, now is the hour of the
Olympian contest, and it may not be put off, and that
by a single defeat or yielding your advance in virtue
maybe either secured or lost. It was thus that Socrates
attained perfection, by giving his heart to reason, and
to reason only. And thou, even if as yet thou art not
a Socrates, yet shouldst live as though it were thy
wish to be one." These are noble words, but who that
reads them will not be reminded of those sacred and
far more deeply-reaching words, ^^ Be ye perfect^ even as
your Father which is in heaven is perfect^ " Behold,
now is the accepted time; behold, nozv is the day of
salvatio7ty

In this brief sketch we have included all the most
important thoughts in the Manual. It ends in these
words, " On all occasions we may keep in mind these
three sentiments : —

HIS ''MANUAL'' AND ''FRAGMENTS:' 229

"*Lead me, O Zeus, and thou. Destiny, whither-
soever ye have appointed me to go, for I will follow,
and that without delay. Should I be unwilling, I
shall follow as a coward, but I must follow all the
same.' (Cleanthes.)

'"Whosoever hath nob'ly yielded to necessity, I
hold him wise, and he knoweth the things of God.'
(Euripides.)

" And this third one also, * O Crito, be it so, if
so be the will of heaven. Anytus and Melitus can
indeed slay me, but harm me they cannot.'
(Socrates.)

To this last conception of life, quoted from the end
of Plato's ^/<5'/<5'^, Epictctus recurs elsewhere : "What
resources have we," he asks, " in circumstances ot
great peril ? What other than the remembrance of
what is or what is not in our own power ; what is
possible to us and what is not } I must die. Be it
so ; but need I die groaning } I must be bound ;/
but must I be bound bewailing .'' I must be driven/
into exile ; well, who prevents me then from goin

with laughter, and cheerfulness, and calm of mind ?

" * Betray secrets.'

" * Indeed I will not, for t/iat rests in my own
hands.'

" * Then I will put you in chains.'

'• * My good sir, what are you talking about } Put
me in chains .-* No, no ! you may put my leg in
chains, but not even Zeus himself can master my
will.'

" ' I will throw you into prison.'

2^o EPICTETUS.

"*My paor little body; yes, no doubt*

*' * I will cut off your head.'

**' ' Well, did I ever tell you that my head was the
only one which could not be cut off?'

" Such are the things of which philosophers should
think, and write them daily, and exercise themselves
therein."

There are many other passages in which Epictetus
shows that the free-will of man is his noblest privilege,
and that we should not " sell it for a trifle ; " or, as
Scripture still more sternly expresses it, should not
"sell ourselves for nought." He relates, for instance,
the complete failure of the Emperor Vespasian to
induce Helvidius Priscus not to go to the Senate.
" While I am a senator," said Helvidius, " I must go."
" Well, then, at least be silent there." " Ask me no
questions, and I will be silent." " But I must ask
your opinion." " And / must say what is right."
" But I will put you to death." " Did I ever tell yoii
I was immortal } Do your part, and / will do mine.
It is yours to kill me, mine to die untrembling ;
yours to banish me, mine to go into banishment
without grief."

We see from these remarkable extracts that the
wisest of the heathen had, by God's grace, attained to
the sense that life was subject to a divine guidance.
Yet how dim was their vision of this truth, how in-
secure their hold upon it, in comparison with that
which the meanest Christian may attain ! They
never definitely grasped the doctrine of immortality

HIS " MA NUA L " AND " FRA GMENTSP 23 1

They never quite got rid of a haunting dread that
perha-DS, after all, they might be nothing" better
than insignificant and unheeded atoms, swept hither
and thither in the mighty eddies of an unseen, im-
personal, 'mysterious agency, and destined hereafter
"to be sealed amid the iron hills," or

" To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with reckless violence about
The pendent world."

Their belief in a personal deity was confused with
their belief in nature, which, in the language of a
mrdern sceptic, "acts with fearful uniformity: stern
as fate, absolute as tyranny, merciless as death ; too
vast to praise, too inexorable to propitiate, it has no
ear for prayer, no heart for sympathy, no arm to
save." How different the soothing and tender cer-
tainty of the Christian's hope, for whom Christ has
brought life and immortality to light ! For " chance"
is not only "the daughter of forethought,' as the old
Greek lyric poet calls her, but the daughter also of
love. How different the prayer of David, even in the
hours of his worst agony and shame, " Let Thy loving
Spirit lead 7ne forth into the land of rightcoiis7iessy
Guidance, and guidance by the hand of love, was — as
even in that dark season he recognised — the very law
of his life ; and his soul, purged by affliction, had but a
single wish - the wish to be led, not into prosperity,
not into a recovery of his lost glory, not even into the
restoration of his lost innocence ; but only, — through

v2

232 EPICTEfUS.

paths however hard — only into the land of righteous-
ness. And because he knew that God would lead
him thitherward, he had no wish, no care for anything
beyond.

We will end this chapter by translating a few of
the isolated fragments of Epictetus which have been
preserved for us by other writers. The wisdom and
beauty of these fragments will interest the reader, for
Epictetus was one of the few " in the very dust of
whose thoughts was gold."

"A life entangled with accident is like a wintry
torrent, for It is turbulent, and foul with mud, and
impassable, and tyrannous, and loud, and brief"

"A soul that dwells with virtue is like a perennial
spring ; for it is pure, and limpid, and refreshful, and
inviting, and serviceable, and rich, and innocent, and
uninjurious."

" If you wish to be good, first believe that you are
bad."

Compare Matt. ix. 12, "They that be whole need
not a physician, but they that are sick ; " John ix. 41,
" Now ye say. We see, therefore your sin remaineth;"
and I John i. 8, " If we say that we have no sin, we
deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us."

"It is base for one who sweetens that which he

HIS ''MANUAL'' AND ''FRAGMENTS:' 233

drinks with the gifts of bees, to embitter by vice his
reason, which is the gift of God."

" Nothing is meaner than the love of pleasure, the
love of gain, and insolence : nothing nobler than high-
mindedness, and gentleness, and philanthropy, and

doing good." :f^^"^ ^

\ _^.. c -^ 'J —

" The vine bears three clusters : the first of
pleasure ; the second of drunkenness ; the third of
insult."

" He is a drunkard who drinks more than three
cups : even if he be not drunken, he has exceeded
moderation."

Our own George Herbert has laid down the same
limit : —

" Be not a beast in courtesy, but stay,
Stay at the third cup, or forego the place.
Wine above all things doth God's stamp deface."

"Like the beacon-lights in harbours, which, kindling
a great blaze by means of a few fagots, afford suf-
ficient aid to vessels that wander over the sea, so,
also, a man of bright character in a storm-tossed city,
himself content with little, effects great blessings foi
his fellow-citizens."

The thought is not unlike that of Shakespeare :

" IIow far yon little candle throws its beams ,
So shines a good deed in a naughty world."

234 EPICTETUS,

But the metaphor which Epictetus more commonly
adopts is one no less beautiful. " What good," asked
some one, " did Helvidius Priscus do m resisting
Vespasian, being but a single person ? " " What
good," answers Epictetus, " does the purple do on the
garment ? Why, it is splendid in itself, and splendid
also in the example zvJiich it affords,''

" As the sun does not wait for prayers and incan-
tations that he may rise, but shines at once, and is
greeted by all ; so neither wait thou for applause, and
shouts, and eulogies, that thou mayst do well ; — but
be a spontaneous benefactor, and thou shalt be be-
loved like the sun."

" Thales, when asked what was the commonest of
all possessions, answered, ' Hope ; for even those
who have nothing else have hope.' "

" Lead, lead me on, my hopes," says Mr. Mac-
donald ; ** I know that ye are true and not vain.
Vanish from my eyes day after day, but arise in new
forms. I will follow your holy deception ; follow till
ye have brought me to the feet of my Father in
heaven, where I shall find you all, with folded wings,
spangling the sapphire dusk whereon stands His
throne which is our home."

"What ought not to be done do not even think
of doing.''

HIS ^^ MANUAL' AND ^^ FRAGMENTS:' 235
Compare

" ' Guafd well thy thoughts, for thoughts are heard in heaven^ "

Epictetus, when asked how a man could grteve
his enemy, replied, " By preparing himself to act in
the noblest way."

Compare Rom. xii. 20, " If thine enemy hunger,
feed him ; if he thirst, give him drink : for in so doing
thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head."

" If you always remember that in all you do in soul
or body God stands by as a witness, in all your
prayers and your actions you will not err ; and you
shall have God dwelling with you."

Compare Rev. iii. Qo, " Behold I stand at the door
and knock : if any man hear my voice, and open the
door, / will come in to him and will sup with him,
and Jie ivith me."

In the discourse written to prove that God keeps
watch upon human actions, Epictetus touches again
on the same topic, saying that God has placed beside
each one of us His own guardian spirit — a spirit that
sleeps not and cannot be beguiled — and has handed
us eadi over to that spirit to protect us. " And to
what better or more careful guardian could He have
entrusted us 1 So that when you have closed your
doors and made darkness within, remember never to
say that yon are alone. For you are not alone ; God,
too, is present there, and your guardian spirit ; and
what need have they of light to see what you are
doing.?"

236 EPICTETUS,

There is in this passage an almost starthng coinci-
dence of thought with those eloquent words in the
BookofEcclesiasticus: "A man that breaketh wedlock,
saying thus in his heart, Who seeth me ? / ajn com-
passed abo7it zvith darkness, the walls cover me, and no
body seeth me : what need I to fear ? the Most Highest
will not remember my sins : snch a man only feareth
the eyes of man , and knoweth not that the eyes of the
Lord are ten thousand times brighter than the sun,
beholding all the ways of men, and considering the
most secret parts. He knew all things ere ever they;
were created : so also after they were perfected He
looked upon all. This man shall be punished in the
streets of the city, and where he expccteth not he
shall be taken." (Ecclus. xxiii. ii — 21.)

" When we were children, our parents entrusted us
to a tutor who kept a continual watch that we might
not suffer harm ; but, when we grow to manhood,
God hands us over to an inborn conscience to guard
us. We must, therefore, by no means despise
this guardianship, since in that case we shall both
be displeasing to God and enemies to our own
conscience,"

Beautiful and remarkable as these fragments are
we have no space for more, and must conclude by
comparing the last with the celebrated lines of George
Heibert : —

" Lord ! with what care hast Thou begirt us round I
Pa7'e7tts first season its. Then schoolmasters
Deliver us to laws. They send us bound
To rules of reason. Holy messenf^ers ;

HIS « MANUAL " AND " FRA GMENTS." 237

Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogginp- sin ;

Afflictions sorted ; anguish of all sizes ;
Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in !

Bibles laid open ; millions of surprises ;
Blessings beforehand ; ties of gratefulness ;

The sound of glory ringing in our ears :
Without one shame ; within our consciences ;

Angels and grace ; eternal hopes and fears 1
Yet all these fences and their whole array,
One cunning bosom sin blows quite away."

CHAPTER V.

THE DISCOURSES OF EPICTETUS.

The Discourses of Epictetus, as originally published
by Arrian, contained eight books, of which only fou-r
have come down to us. They are in many respects
the most valuable expression of his views. There is
something slightly repellent in the stern concision,
the ** imperious brevity," of the Ma?mal. In the
Manual^ says M. Martha,* (M:he reason of the Stoic
proclaims its laws with an impassibility which is little
human ; it imposes silence on all the passions, even
the most respectable ; it glories in waging against
them an internecine war, and seems even to wish to
repress the most legitimate impulses of generous
sensibilityj^ In reading these rigorous maxims one
might be tempted to believe that this legislator of
morality is a man without a heart, and, if we were not
touched by the original sincerity of the language, one
would only see in this lapidary style the conventional
precepts of a chimerical system or the aspirations of
an impossible perfection." The Discourses are more
illustrative, more argumentative, more diffuse, more
* Moralistes sous 1' Empire, p. 200.

HIS ''DISCOURSES." 239

human. In reading them one feels oneself face to
face with a human being, not with the marble statue
of the ideal wise man. The style, indeed, is simple,
but its "athletic nudity" is well suited to this militant
morality ; its picturesque and incisive character, its
vigorous metaphors, its vulgar expressions, its ab-
sence of all conventional elegance, display a certain
"plebeian originality ' which gives them an almost
autobiographic charm. With trenchant logic and
intrepid conviction " he wrestles w^ith the passions,
questions them, makes them answer, and confounds
them in a few words which are often sublime. This
Socrates without grace does not amuse us by making
his adversary fall into the long entanglement of a
captious dialogue, but he rudely seizes and often
finishes hini with two blows. It is like the eloquence
of Phocion, which Demosthenes compares to an axe
which is lifted and falls."

Epictetus, like Seneca, is a preacher; a preacher
with less wealth of genius, less eloquence of ex-
pression, less width of culture, but with far more
bravery, clearness, consistency, and grasp of his sub-
ject. His doctrine and his life were singularly homo-
geneous, and his views admit of brief expression,
for they are not weakened by any fluctuations, or
chequered with any lights and shades. The Discourses
differ from the Manual only in their manner, their
frequent anecdotes, their pointed illustrations, and
their vivid interlocutory form. (The remark of Pascal,
that Epictetus knew the grandeur of the human heart,

but did not know its weaknessNapplies to the Matiiial^

\v

240 EPICTETUS,

but can hardly be maintained when we judge him by
seme of the answers which he gave to those who came
to seek for his consolation or advice.

The Discourses are not systematic in their character,
and, even if they were, the loss of the last four books
would prevent us from working out their system with
any completeness. Our sketch of the Manual ^niW
already have put the reader in possession of the main
principles and ideas of Epictetus ; with the mental
and physical philosophy of the schools he did not in
any way concern himself; it was his aim to be a
moral preacher, to ennoble the lives of men and touch
their hearts. He neither plagiarised nor invented, but
he gave to Stoicism a practical reality. All that
remains for us to do is to choose from the Discourses
some of his most characteristic views, and the modes
by which he brought them home to his hearers.
Cit was one of the most essential peculiarities of
Stoicism to aim at absolute independence, or self-
dependence. Now, as the weaknesses and servilities
of men arise most frequently from their desire for
superfluities, the true man must absolutely get rid of
any such desire. He must increase his wealth by
moderating his wishes ; he must despise all the
luxuries for which men long, and he must greatly
diminish the number of supposed necessaries^ We
have already seen some of the arguments which point
in this direction, a-nd we may add another from the
third book of Discourses.

A certain magnificent orator, who was going to
Rome on a lawsuit, had called on Epictetus. The

HIS ''DISCOURSESJ" 2Ai

philosopher threw cold water on his visit, because he
did not believe in his sincerity. '* You will get no
more from me," he said, " than you would g-et from
any cobbler or greengrocer, for you have only come
because it happened to be convenient, and you will
only criticise my style, not really wishing to learn
principles^ " Well, but," answered the orator, " if I
attend to that sort of thing, I shall be a mere pauper
like you, with no plate, or equipage, or land." " I
don't zvant such things," replied Epictetus ; " and,
besides, you are poorer than I am, after all." " Why,
how so.-^" "You have no constancy, no unanimity
with nature, no freedom from perturbations. Patron
or no patron, what care I 1 You do care. I am richer
than you. / don't care what Caesar thinks of me. 1
flatter no one. This is what I have instead of your
silver and gold plate. You have silver vessels, but
earthemvare reasons, principles, appetites. My mind
to me a kingdom is, and it furnishes me abundant
and happy occupation in lieu of your restless idleness.
All your possessions seem small to you, mine seem
great to me. Your desire is insatiate, mine is satis-
fied." The comparison with which he ends the dis-
cussion is very remarkable. I once had the privilege
of hearing Sir William Hooker explain to the late
Queen Adelaide the contents of the Kew Museum.
Among them was a cocoa-nut with a hole in it, and
Sir William explained to the Queen that in certain
parts of India, when the natives want to catch the
nfionkeys they make holes in cocoa-nuts, and fill
them with sugar. The monkeys thrust in their hands

tS3 EPICTETUS.

and fill them with sugar ; the aperture is too small to
draw the paws out again when thus increased in size ;
the monkeys have not the sense to loose their hold
of the sugar, and so they are caught. This little
anecdote will enable the reader to relish the illustra-
tion of Epictetus. *rWhen little boys thrust their
hands into narrow-mouthed jars full of figs and
almonds, when they have filled their hands they can-
not draw them out again, and so begin to howlT) Let
go a few of the figs and almonds, and you'll get your
hand out. And so yoit, let go your desires. Don't
desire many things, and you'll get what you do
desire." \Blessed is he that eXpecfeth nothing, for
he shall not be disappointed j "

Another of the constant precepts of Epictetus is
that we should aim high ; we are not to be common
threads in the woof of life, but like the iaticlave on
the robe of a senator, the broad purple stripe which
gave lustre and beauty to the whole. But how are
we to know that we are qualified for this high func-
tion i How does the bull know, when the lion ap-
proaches, that it is his place to expose himself for all
the herd } If we have high powers we shall soon
be conscious of them, and if we have them not we
may gradually acquire them. Nothing great is
produced at once, — the vine must blossom, and bear
fruit, and ripen, before we have the purple clusters
of the grape, — " first the blade, then the ear, after
that the full corn in the ear."

But whence are we to derive this high sense of
Juty and possible eminence ? Why, if Caesar had

HIS ''discourses:' 243

adopted you, would you not show your proud sense
of ennoblement in haughty looks ; how is it that
you are not proud of being sons of God ? You
have, indeed, a body, by virtue of which many men
sink into close kinship with pernicious wolves, and
savage lions, and crafty foxes, destroying the rational
within them, and so becoming greedy cattle or mis-
chievous vermin ; but above and beyond this, " If,"
says Epictetus, " a man have once been worthily
interpenetrated with the belief that we all have been
in some special manner born of God, and that God is
the Father of gods and men, I think that he will
never have any ignoble, any humble thoughts about
himself." Our own great Milton has hardly ex-
pressed this high truth more nobly when he says, that
" He that holds himself in reverence and due esteem,
both for the dignity of God's image upon him, and
for the price of his redemption, which he thinks is
visibly marked upon his forehead, accounts himself
both a fit person to do the noblest and godliest
deeds, and much better worth than to deject and
defile, with such a debasement and pollution as sin is,
himself so highly ransomed, and ennobled to a new
friendship and filial relation with God."

r' And how are we to know that we have made
progress ? We may know it if our own wills are bent
to live in conformity with nature ; if we be noble,
free, faithful, humble ; if desiring nothing, and shunning
nothing which lies beyond our power, we sit loose to
all earthly interests ; if our lives are under the distinct
governance of immutable and noble laws,
ir ^^■2

244 EPICTETUS,

" But shall we not meet with troubles in life ?
Yes, undoubtedly ; and are there none at Olympia ?
Are you not burnt with heat, and pressed for room,
and wetted with showers when it rains ? Is there not
more than enough clamour, and shouting, and other
troubles ? Yet I suppose you tolerate and endure all
these when you balance them against the magnificence
of the spectacle ? And, come now, have you not re-
ceived powers wherewith to bear whatever occurs ?
Have you not received magnanimity, courage, forti-
tude ? And why, if I am magnanimous, should I
care for anything that can possibly happen ? what
shall alarm or trouble me, or seem painful ? Shall I
not use the facu.ty for the ends for which it was
granted me, or shall I grieve and groan at all the
accidents of life ? On the contrary, these troubles
and difficulties are strong antagonists pitted against
us, and we may conquer them, if we will, in the
Olympic game of life.

/But if life and its burdens become absolutely into-
lerable, may we not go back to God, from whom we
came ? may we not show thieves and robbers, and
tyrants who claim power over us by means of our
bodies and possessions, that they \\?lvq.7w poiver? In
a word, may we not commit- suicide ?"./ We know how
Shakespeare treats this question : —

** For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
"Which patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make

HIS " DISCO URSES, » 245

With a bare bodkin ? Who would these fardels bear.

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of sornething after deaths

The tcnJiscovered country from whose bourne

No travellei' returns^ puzzles the tuill :

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that 7ue know not of? ''

C^ut Epictetus had no materials for such an answer.
I do not remember a single passage in which he refers
to immortality or the life to come, and it is therefore
probable either that he did not believe in it at all, or
that he put it aside as one of those things which are
out of our own powers) Yet his answer is not that
glorification of suicide which we find throughout the
tragedies of Seneca, and which was one of the com-
monplaces of Stoicism. " My friends," he says, " wait
God's good time till He gives you the signal, and
dismisses you from this service ; then dismiss your-
selves to go to Him. But for the present restrain
yourselves, inhabiting the spot which He has at present
a.ssigned you. For, after all, this time of your sojourn
Jiere is short, and easy for those who are thus dis-
posed ; for what tyrant, or thief, or judgment-halls,
are objects of dread to those who thus absolutely
disesteem the body and its belongings ^ Stay, then,
and do not depart without due cause."

It will be seen that Epictetus permits suicide with-
out extolling it, for in another place (ii. i) he says:
*' What is pain } A mere ugly mask ; turn it, and
see that it is so. This little flesh of ours is acted on
rc^ughly, and then again smoothly. If it is not for
vour interest to bear it, the door is open ; if it is fcr

246 EPICTETUS.

your interest — endure. It is right that under all
circumstances the door should be open, since so men
end all trouble.")

(This power of endurance is completely the key-
note of the Stoical view of life, and the method of
attaining to it, by practising contCTRot for all external
accidents, is constantly inculcated, y I have already
told the anecdote about Agrippinus by which Epic-
tetus admiringly shows that no extreme of necessary
misfortune could wring from the true Stoic a single
expression of indignation or of sorrow.

\The inevitable, then, in the view of '^e Stoics,
comes from God, and it is our duty not .0 murmur
against it.'j But this being the guiding conception as
regards otlrselves, how are we to treat others ? Here,
too, our duties spring directly from our relation to
God. It is that relation which makes us reverence
ourselves, it is that which should make lis honour
others. " Slave ! will you not bear with your own
brother, who has God for his father no less than
you } But they are wicked, perhaps — thieves and
murderers. Be it so, then they deserve all the more
pity. You don't exterminate the blind or deaf
because of their misfortunes, but you pity them :
but how much more to be pitied are wicked men }
Don't execrate them. Are you yourself so very
wise .''

Nor are the precepts of Epictetus all abstract
principles ; he often pauses to give definite rules of
conduct and practice. Nothing, for instance, can
exceed the wisdom with which he speaks of habits

HIS ''discourses:' 247

(ii. 18), and the best means of acquiring good habits
and conquering evil ones. iHe points out that we are
the creatures of habit ; that every single act is a
definite grain in the sand-multitude of influences
which make up our daily life ; that each time we are
angry or evil-inclined we are adding fuel to a fire,
and virulence to the seeds of a disea^ A fever may
be cured, but it leaves the health weaker ; and so also
is it with the diseases of the soul. They leave their
mark behind them.

Take the instance of anger. " Do you wish not to
be passionate ? do not then cherish the habit within
you, and do not add any stimulant thereto. Be calm
at first, and then number the da}'s in which you have
not been in a rage. I used to be angry every day, now
it is only every other day, then ^.Y^ry third, then every
fourth day. But should you have passed even thirty
days witlrout a relapse, then offer a sacrifice to God.
For the habit is first loosened, then utterly eradicated.
* I did not yield to vexation to-day, nor the next day,
nor so on for two or three months, but I restrained
myself under various provocations.' Be sure, if you
can say thaty that it wiJl soon be all right with you."

But how is one to do all this "i that is the great
question, and Epictetus is quite ready to give you
the best answer he can. We- have, for instance,
already quoted one passage in which (unlike the
majority of Pagan moralists)Mie shows that he has
thoroughly mastered the ethicaT importance of con-
trolling even the thought of wickedness.^^ Another
anecdote about Agrippinus will further illustrate the

248 EPlCTETUS.

same doctrine. It was the wicked practice of Nero
to make noble Romans appear on the stage or in
gladiatorial shows, in order that he might thus seem
to have their sanction for his own degrading displays.
On one occasion Florus, who was doubting whether
or not he should obey the mandate, consulted Agrip-
pinus on the subject. " Go by all means,'' replied
Agrippinus. " But why don't yo7i go, then ? " asked
Florus. " Because'' said Agrippinus, '' I do not de-
liberate about it!' He implied by this answer that to
hesitate is to yield, to deliberate is to be lost ; we
must act always on principles, we must never pause to
calculate consequences. " But if I don't go," objected
Florus, " I shall have my head cut off." " Well, then,
go, but / won't." " Why won't you go ? " *' Because
I do not care to be of a piece with the common
thread of life ; I like to be the purple sewn upon it."

And if we want a due motive for such lofty choice
Epictetus will supply it. " Wish," he says, " to win
the suffrages of your own inward approval, wish to
appear beautiful to God. Desire to be pure with
your own pure self, and with God. And when any
evil fancy assails you, Plato says, ' Go to the rites of
expiation, go as a suppliant to the temples of the
gods, the averters of evil.' But it will be enough
should you even rise and depart to the society of
the noble and the good, to live according to their
examples, whether you have any such friend among
the living or among the dead. Go to Socrates, and
gaze on his utter mastery over temptation and
passion ; consider how glorious was the conscious

HIS ''discourses:' ^49

victory over himself ! What an Olympic triumph !
How near does it place him to Hercules himself •
So that, by heaven, one might justly salute him,
* Hail, marvellous conqueror, who hast conquered,
not these miserable boxers and athletes, nor these
gladiators who resemble them.' And should you thus
be accustomed to train yourself, you will see what
shoulders you will get, what nerves, what sinews,
instead of mere babblements, and nothing more.
This is the true athlete, the man who trains himself
to deal with such semblances as these. Great is the
struggle, divine the deed ; it is for kingdom, for free-
dom, for tranquillity, for peace. Think on God ; call
upon Him as thine aid and champion, as sailors call on
the Great Twin Brethren in the storm. And indeed
what storm is greater than that which rises from
powerful semblances that dash reason out of its
course ? What indeed but semblance is a storm
itself.-^ Since, come now, remove the fear k}{ death,
and bring as many thunders and lightnings as thou
wilt, and thou shalt know how great is the tran-
quillity and calm in that reason which is the ruling
faculty of the soul. But should you once be worsted,
and say that you will conquer hereafter, and then
the. same again and again, know that thus your con-
dition will be vile and weak, so that at the last you
will not even know that you are doing wrong, but
you will even begin to provide excuses for your sin ;
and then you will confirm the truth of that saying of
Hesiod,—

"'The man that procrastinates straggles ever with ruin.'"

250 EPICTETUS.

Even so ! So early did a heathen moralist learn
the solemn fact that " only this once " ends in " there
is no harm in it." Well does Mr. Coventry Patmore
sing :—

" How easy to keep free from sin ;
How hard that freedom to recall ;
For awful truth it is that men
Forget 'CsxQ. heaven from which they fall."

In another place. Epictetus warns us, however, not to
be too easily discouraged in our attempts after good ;
— and, above all, never to despair. " In the schools
of the wrestling master, when a boy falls he is bidden
to get up again, and to go on wrestling day by day
till he has acquired strength ; and we must do the
same, and not be like those poor wretches who after
one failure suffer themselves to be swept along as
by a torrent. You need but wt//," he says, " and it
is done ; but if you relax your efforts, you will be
ruined ; for ruin and recovery are both from within.
— And what will you gain by all this } You will
gain modesty for impudence, purity for vileness, mode-
ration for drunkenness. If you think there are any
better ends than these, then by all means go on in sin,
for you are beyond the power of any god to save."

But Epictetus is particularly in earnest about warn-
ing us that to profess these principles and ta/k about
them is one thing — to act up to them quite another.,
He draws a humorous picture of an inconsistent and
unreal philosopher, who — after eloquently proving
that nothing is good but what pertains to virtue, and
nothing evil but what pertains to vice, and that all

HIS ''DISCOURSES:' 2Cj

other things are indifferent, — goes to sea. A storm
comes on, and the masts creak, and the philosopher
screams ; and an impertinent person stands by and
asks in surprise, " Is it then vice to suffer shipwreck ?
because, if not, it can be no evil ; " a question which
makes our philosopher so angry that he is inclined to
fling a log at his interlocutor's head. But Epictetus
sternly tells him that the philosopher never was one
at all, except in name ; that as he sat in the schools
puffed up by homage and adulation, his innate
cowardice and conceit were but hidden under bor-
rowed plumes ; and that in him the name of Stoic
was usurped.

"Why," he asks in another passage, "why do yo..
call yourself a Stoic ? Why do you deceive the
multitude ? Why do you act the Jew when you are
a Greek ? Don't you see on what terms each person
is called a Jew ? or a Syrian } or an Egyptian ? And
when we see some mere trimmer we are in the habit
of saying, * This is no Jew ; he is only acting the
part of one ; ' but when a man takes up the entire
condition of a proselyte, thoroughly imbued with
Jewish doctrines, then he both is in reality and is
called a Jew. So we philosophers too, dipped in a
false dye, are Jeivs in name, but in reality are some-
thing else. . . . We call ourselves philosophers when
we cannot even play the part of men, as though a
man should try to heave the stone of Ajax who
cannot lift ten pound.s." The passage is interesting
not only on its own account, but because of its
curious similarity both with the language and with

X

252 EPICTETUS.

the sentiment of St. Paul — " He is not a Jew who is
one outwardly, neither is that circumcision which is
outward in the flesh, but he is a Jew who is one
inwardly ; and circumcision is that of the heart, in
the spirit and not in the letter ; whose praise is not
of men, but of God."

The best way to become a philosopher in deed is
not by a mere study of books and knowledge of
doctrines, but by a steady diligence of actions and
adherence to original principles, to which must be
added consistency and self-control. " These prin-
ciples," says Epictetus, " produce friendship in a
house, unanimity in a city, peace in nations ; they
make a man grateful to God, bold under all circum-
stances, as though dealing with things alien and
valueless. Now we are capable of writing these
things, and reading them, and praising them when
they are read, but we are far enough off following
them. Hence comes it that the reproach of the
Lacedaemonians, that they are ' lions at home, foxes
at Ephesus,' will also apply to us ; in the school we
are lions, out of it foxes."

These passages include, I think, all the m.ost
original, important, and characteristic conceptions
which are to be found in the Discourses. They are
most prominently illustrated in the long and im-
portant chapter on the Cynic philosophy. A
genuine Cynic — one who was so, not in brutality of
manners or ostentation of rabid eccentricity, but a
Cynic in life and in his inmost principles— was evi-
dently in the eyes of Epictetus one of the loftiest

his '' discourses:' 253

of human beings. He drew a sketch of his ideal
conception to one of his scholars who inquired of
him upon the subject.

He begins by saying that a true Cynic is so lofty a
being that he who undertakes the profession without
due qualifications kindles against him the anger of
heaven. He is like a scurrilous Thersites, claiming
the imperial office of an Agamemnon. "If you
think," he tells the young student, ''that you can
be a Cynic merely by wearing an old cloak, and
sleeping on a hard bed, and using a wallet and staff,
and begging, and rebuking every one whom you see
effeminately dressed or wearing purple, you don't
know what you are about — get you gone ; but if you
know what a Cynic really is, and think yourself
capable of being one, then consider how great a thing
you are undertaking.

"First as to yourself.^ You must be absolutely
resigned to the will of God. You must conquer every
passion, abrogate every desire.] Your life must be
transparently open to the view of God and man.
Other men conceal their actions with housesy and
doors, and darkness, and guards ; your house, your
door, your darkness, must be a sense of holy shame.
You must conceal nothing ; you must have nothing
to conceal. You must be known as the spy and
messenger of God among mankind.

/*You must teach men that happiness is not' there,
where in their blindness and misery they seek iy It
is not in strength, for Myro and Ofellius were not
happy : not in wealth, for Croesus was not happy :

254 EPICTETUS.

not in power, for the Consuls are not happy : not in
all these together, for Nero, and Sardanapalus, and
Agamemnon sighed, and wept, and tore their hair,
and were the slaves of circumstances and the dupes
of semblances.(^t lies in yourselves ; in true freedom,
in the absence or conquest of every ignoble fear ; in
perfect self-government ; in a power of contentment
and peace, and the * even flow of life ' amid poverty
exile, disease, and the very valley of the shadow o.
deatlS)^ Can you face this Olympic contest ? Ar
your thews and sinews strong enough ? Can you fac*.

the fact that those who are defeated are also disgraced
and whipped ?

'* Only by God's aid can you attain to this. Only
by His aid can you be beaten like an ass, and yet
love those who beat you, preserving an unshaken
unanimity in the midst of circumstances which to
other men would cause trouble, and giief, axid dis-
appointment, and despair.

*(*rhe Cynic must learn to do without friends, for
wh^ can he find a friend worthy of him, or a king
worthy of sharing his moral sceptr^Cj[he friend of
the truly noble must be as truly noble as himself,
and such a friend the genuine Cynic cannot hope to
find. Nor must he marry; marriage is right and
honourable in other men, but its entanglements, its
expenses, its distractions, would render impossible
a life devoted to the service of heaveiiN

" Nor will he mingle in the aftairs of any common-
wealth : his commonwealth is not Athens or Corinth,
but mankind.

HIS " discourses:' 255

" In person he should be strong, and robust, and
hale, and in spite of his indigence always clean and
attractive. Tact and intelligence, and a power of
swift repartee, are necessary to him. His conscience
m-ust be clear as the sun. He must sleep purely, and
wake still more purely. To abuse and insult he must
be as insensible as a stone, and he must place all fears
and desires beneath his feet. To be a Cynic is to be
this : before you attempt it deliberate well, and see
whether by the help of God you are capable of
achieving it."

I have given a sketch of the doctrines of this lofty
chapter, but fully to enjoy its morality and eloquence
the reader should study it entire, and observe its
generous impatience, its noble ardour, its vivid interro-
gations, " in which," says M. Martha, " one feels as it
were a frenzy of virtue and of piety, and in which the
plenitude of a great heart tumultuously precipitates a
torrent of holy thoughts."

Epictetus was not a Christian. He has only once
alluded to the Christians in his works, and there it is
under the opprobrious title of " Galileans," who prac-
tised a kind of insensibility in painful circumstances
and an indifference to worldly interests which Epic-
tetus unjustly sets down to " mere habit." Unhappily
it was not granted to these heathen philosophers in
any true sense to know what Christianity was. They
ignorantly thought that it was an attempt to imitate
the results of philosophy, without having passed
through the necessary discipline. They viewed
it with suspicion, they treated it with injustice.

x2

2s6 EPICTETUS.

And yet In Christianity, and in Christianity alone,
they would have found an ideal which would have
surpassed their loftiest conceptions. Nor was it only
an impossible ideal ; it was an ideal rendered attain-
able by the impressive sanction of the highest
authority, and one which supported men to bear the
difficulties of life with fortitude, with peacefulness,
and even with an inward joy ; it ennobled their
faculties without overstraining them ; it enabled them
to disregard the burden of present trials, not by
vainly attempting to deny their bitterness or ignore
their weight, but in the high certainty that they are
the brief and necessary prelude to " a far more exceed-
ing and eternal weight of glory."

MARCUS AURELIUS.

CHAPTER I.

THE EDUCATION OF AN EMPEROR.

The life of the noblest of Pagan Emperors may
well follow that of the noblest of Pagan slaves.
Their glory shines the purer and brighter from the
midst of a corrupt and deplorable society. Epic-
tetus showed that a Phrygian slave could live a life
of the loftiest exaltation : Aurelius proved that a
Roman Emperor could live a life of the deepest
humility. The one — a foreigner, feeble, deformed,
ignorant, born in squalor, bred in degradation, the
despised chattel of a despicable freedman, sur-
rounded by every depressing, ignoble, and pitiable
circumstance of life — showed how one who seemed
born to be a wretch could win noble happiness and
immortal memory ; the other — a Roman, a patri-
cian, strong, of heavenly beauty, of noble ancestors,
almost born to the purple, the favourite of Emperors,
the greatest conqueror, the greatest philosopher, the
greatest ruler of his time — proved for ever that it
is possible to be virtuous, and tender, and hoi}', and

253 MARCUS A URELIUS.

contented in the midst of sadness, even on an irre-
sponsible and imperial throne. Strange that, of the
two, the Emperor is even sweeter, more simple, more
admirable, more humbly and touchingly resigned, than
the slave. In him. Stoicism loses all its haughty self-
assertion, all its impracticable paradox, for a manly
melancholy which at once troubles and charms the
heart. " It seems," says M. Martha, "that in him the
philosophy of heathendom grows less proud, draws
nearer and nearer to a Christianity whicli it ignored or
which it despised, and is ready to fling itself into the
arms of the * Unknown God.' In the sad Meditations
of Aiirelius we find a pure serenity, sweetness, and
docility to the commands of God, which before him
were unknown, and which Christian grace has alone
surpassed. If he has not yet attained to charity in all
that fulness of meaning which Christianity has given
to the word he has already gained its unction, and one
cannot read his book, unique in the history of Pagan
philosophy, without thinking of the sadness of Pascal
and the gentleness of Fenelon. We must pause
before this soul, so lofty and so pure, to contemplate
ancient virtue in its softest brilliancy, to see the moral
delicacy to which profane doctrines have attained —
how they laid down their pride, and how penetrating
a grace they have found in their new simplicity. To
make the example yet more striking, Providence,
which, according to the Stoics, does nothing by
chance, determined that the example of these simple
virtues .should bloom in the midst of all human
grandeurs— that charity should be taught by the

THE EDUCA TION OF AN EMPEROR. 259

successor of blood-stained Caesars, and humbleness of
heart by an Emperor."

Aurelius has always exercised a powerful fascina-
tion over the minds of eminent men. " If you set
aside, for a moment, the contem.plation of the Chris-
tian verities," saj'S the eloquent and thoughtful Mon-
tesquieu, "search throughout all nature, and you will
not find a grander object than the Antonines. . . .
One feels a secret pleasure in speaking of this Em-
peror ; one cannot read his life without a softening
feeling of emotion. He produces such an effect upon
our minds that we think better of ourselves, because
he inspires us with a better opinion of mankind." " It
is more delightful," says the great historian Niebuhr,
" to speak of Marcus Aurelius than of any man in
history ; for if there is any sublime human virtue it
is his. He was certainly the noblest character of his
time, and I know no other man who combined such
unaffected kindness, mildness, and humility, with
such conscientiousness and severity towards him-
self. We possess innum^erable busts of him, for
every Roman of his time was anxious to possess his
portrait, and if there is anywhere an expression
of virtue it is in the heavenly features of Marcus
Aurelius."

Marcus Aurelius was born on April 26, A.D. 121.
His more correct designation would be Marcus
Antoninus, but since he bore several different names
at different periods of his life, and since at that age
nothintr was more common than a change of desig-
nation, it is hardly worth while to alter the name b^

26o MARCUS AURELIUS.

wliich he is most popularly recognised. His father,
x\nnius Verus, who died in his Praetorship, drew his
blood from a line of illustrious men who claimed
descent from Numa, the second King of Rome. His
mother, Domitia Calvilla, was also a lady of consular
and kingly race. The character of both seems to
have been worthy of their high dignity. Of his
father he can have known little, since Annius died
when Aurelius was a mere infant ; but in his Medi-
tations he has left us a grateful memorial of both his
parents. He says that from his grandfather he
learned (or, might have learned) good morals and
the government of his temper ; from the reputation
and remembrance of his father, modesty and manli-
ness ; from his mother, piety, and beneficence, and
abstinence not only from evil deeds, but even from evil
thoughts ; and, further, simplicity of life far removed
from the habits of the rich.

The childhood and boyhood of Aurelius fell during
the reign of Hadrian. The times were better than
those which we have contemplated in the reigns of the
Caesars. After the suicide of Nero and the brief
reigns of Galba and Otho, the Roman world had
breathed more freely for a time under the rough good
humour of Vespasian and the philosophic virtue of
Titus. The reign of Domitian, indeed, who succeeded
his brother Titus, was scarcely less terrible and in-
famous than that of Caius or of Nero ; but that prince,
shortly before his murder, had dreamt that a golden
neck had grown out of his own, and interpreted the
dream to indicate that a better race of prir»ces

THE EDUCATION OF AN EMPEROR. 261

should follow him. The dream was fulfilled. What-
ever may have been their other faults, Nerva, Trajan,
Hadrian, were wise and kind-hearted rulers ; Anto-
ninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius were among the very-
gentlest and noblest sovereigns whom the world has
ever seen.

Hadrian, though an able, indefatigable, and, on the
whole, beneficial Emperor, was a man whose character
was stained with serious faults. It is, however, greatly
to his honour that he recognised in Aurelius, at the
early age of six years, the germs of those extra-
ordinary virtues which afterwards blessed the empire
and elevated the sentiments of mankind. " Hadrian's
bad and sinful habits left him," says Niebuhr, " when
he gazed on the sweetness of that innocent child.
Playing on the boy's paternal name of Veriis, he
called him Verissimus, * the most true.' " It is inte-
resting to find that this trait of character was so
early developed in one who thought that all men
" should speak as they think, with an accent of heroic
verity."

Towards the end of his long reign, worn out with
disease and weariness, Hadrian, being childless, had
adopted as his son L. Ceionius Commodus, a man
who had few recommendations but his personaJ
beauty. Upon his death, which took place a year
afterwards, Hadrian, assembling the senators round
his sick bed, adopted and presented to them as their
future Emperor Arrius Antoninus, better known by
the surname of Pius, which he won by his gratitude to
the memory of his predecessor. Had Aurelius been

26?. MARCUS AURELIUS.

older — he was then but seventeen — it is known that
Hadrian would have chosen ///;;/, and not Antoninus,
for his heir. The latter, indeed, who was then fifty-
two years old, was only selected on the express con-
dition that he should in turn adopt both Marcus
Aurelius and the son of the deceased Ceionius.
Thus, at the age of seventeen, AureHus, who, even
from his infancy, had been loaded with conspicuous
distinctions, saw himself the acknowledged heir to the
empire of the world.

We are happily able, mainly from his own writings,
to give some sketch of the influences and the
education which had formed him for this exalted
station.

He was brought up in the house of his grandfather
a man who had been three times consul. He makes
it a matter of congratulation, and thankfulness to the
gods, that he had not been sent to any public school,
where he would have run the risk of being tainted
by that frightful corruption into which, for many
years, the Roman youth had fallen. He expresses a
sense of obligation to his great-grandfather for having
supplied him with good teachers at home, and for
the conviction that on such things a man should
spend liberally. There was nothing jealous, barren,
or illiberal, in the training he received. He was fond
of 'boxing, wrestling, running ; he was an admirable
player at ball, and he was fond of the perilous
excitement of hunting the wild boar. Thus, his
healthy sports, his serious studies, his moral instruc-
tion, his public dignities and duties, all contributed

THE EDUCATION OF AN EMPEROR, 263

to form his character in a beautiful and manly mould.
There are, however, three respects in which his educa-
tion seems especially worthy of notice ; — I mean the
diligence^ the gratitude, and the Jiardincss in which
he was encouraged by others, and which he practised
with all the ardour of generous conviction.

1. In the best sense of the word, Aurelius was
diligent. He alludes more than once in his Medi-
tations to the inestimable value of time, and to his
ardent desire to gain more leisure for intellectual
pursuits. Pie flung himself with his usual undeviating
stedfastness of purpose into every branch of study, and,
though he deliberately abandoned rhetoric, he toiled
hard at philosophy, at the discipline of arms, at the
administration of business, and at the difficult study
Df Roman jurisprudence. One of the acquisitions for
which he expresses gratitude to his tutor Rusticus, is
♦hat of reading carefully, and not being satisfied with
?he superficial understanding of a book. In fact, so
strenuous was his labour, and so great his abstemious-
ness, that his health suffered by the combination of
the two.

2. His opening remarks show that he remembered
all his teachers — even the most insignificant — with
sincere gratitude. He regarded each one of them as
a man from whom something could be learnt, and
from whom he actuallv did learn that something:.
Hence the honourable respect — a respect as honour-
able to himself as to them — which he paid to Fronto,
to Rusticus, to Julius Proculus, and others whom his
nc^ble and conscientious gratitude raised to the higbcs!:

2U MARCUS AURELWS.

dignities of the State. He even thanks the gods that
" he made haste to place those who brought him up
in the station of honour which they seemed to desire,
without putting them off with mere hopes of his
doing it some time after, because they were then
still young." He was far the superior of these men,
not only socially but even morally and intellectually ;
yet from the height of his exalted rank and character
he delighted to associate with them on the most
friendly terms, and to treat them, even till his death,
with affection and honour, to place their likenesses
among his household gods, and visit their sepul-
chres with wreaths and victims.

3. His hardiness and self-denial were perhaps still
more remarkable. I wish that those boys of our day,
who think it undignified to travel second-class, who
dress in the extreme of fashion, wear roses in their
buttonholes, and spend upon ices and strawberries
what would maintain a poor man for a year, would
learn how infinitely more nobU was the abstinence of
this young Roman, who, though born in the midst of
splendour and luxury, learnt from the first to loathe
ithe petty vice of gluttony, and to despise the unmanli-
ness of self-indulgence. Very early in life he joined
the glorious fellowship of those who esteem it not
only a duty but a pleasure

" To scorn delights, and live laborious days,"

and had learnt "endurance of labour, and to want
little, and to work with his own hands." In his
eleventh year he became acquainted with Diognetu^:,

THE EDUCATION OF AN EMPEROR. 263

who first introduced him to the Stoic philosophy,
and in his twelfth year he assumed the Stoic dress.
This philosophy taught him "to prefer a plank-bed
and skin, and whatever else of the kind belongs to
the Grecian discipline." It is said that "the skin"
was a concession to the entreaties of his mother, and
that the young philosopher himself would have
chosen to sleep on the bare boards or on the ground.
Yet he acted thus without self-assertion and without
ostentation. His friends found him always cheerful ;
and his calm features, — in which a dignity and
thoughtfulness of spirit contrasted with the bloom
and beauty of a pure and honourable boyhood, —
were never overshadowed with ill-temper or with
gloom.

The guardians of Marcus Aurelius had gathered
around him all the most distinguished literary teachers
o\ the age. Never had a prince a greater number of
eminent instructors ; never were any teachers made
happy by a more grateful, a more humble, a more
blameless, a more truly royal and glorious pupil.
Long years after his education had ceased, during
his campaign among the Quadi, he wrote a sketch
of what he owed to them. This sketch forms the
first book of his Meditations, and is characterised
throughout by the most unaffected simplicity and
modesty.

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius were in fact his
private diary ; they are a noble soliloquy with his
own heart, an honest examination of his own con-
science ; there is not the slightest trace of their having

266 MARCUS AURELWS.

been intended for any eye but his own. In them he
was acting on the principle of St. Augustine : *' Go up
into the tribunal of thy conscience, and set thyself
before thyself." He was ever bearing about —

" A silent court of justice in himself,
Himself the judge and jury, and himself
The prisoner at the bar. "

And writing amid all the cares and distractions of a
war which he detested, he averted his eyes from the
manifold wearinesses which daily vexed his soul,
and calmly sat down to meditate on all the great
qualities which he had observed, and all the good
lessons that he might have learnt from those who
had instructed his boyhood, and surrounded his
manly years.

And what had he learnt.'' — learnt heartily to admire,
and {we may say) learnt to practise also } A sketch
of his first book will show us. What he had sfained
from his immediate parents we have seen already,
and we will make a brief abstract of his other
obligations.

From ** his governor" — to which of his teachers
this name applies we are not sure — he had learnt to
avoid factions at the races, to work hard, and to
avoid listening to slander ; from Diognetus, to despise
frivolous superstitions, and to practise self-denial ;
from Apollonius, undeviating steadiness of purpose,
endurance of misfortune, and the reception of favours
without being humbled by them ; from Sextus of
Chaeronea (a grandson of the celebrated Plutarch),

THE EDUCATION*OF AN EMPEROR. 267

tolerance of the ignorant, gravity without affectation,
and benevolence of heart ; from Alexander, delicacy
in correcting others ; from Severus, "a disposition to
do good, and to give to others readily, and to cherish
good hope, and to believe that I am beloved of my
friends;" from Maximus, "sweetness and dignity,
and to do what was set before me without complain-
ing ; " from Alexander the Platonic, " not frequently
to say to any one, nor to zurite in a letter ^ that I have
no leistire ; nor continually to excuse the neglect of
ordinary duties by alleging urgent occupations."

To one or two others his obligations were still
more characteristic and important. From Rusticus,
for instance, an excellent and able man, whose advice
for years he was accustomed to respect, he had learnt
to despise sophistry and display, to write with sim-
plicity, to be easily pacified, to be accurate, and — an
inestimable benefit this, and one which tinged the
colour of his whole life — to become acquainted with
the Discourses of Epictetus. And from his adoptive
father, the great Antoninus Pius, he had derived
advantages still more considerable. In him he saw
the example of a sovereign and statesman firm, self-
controlled, modest, faithful, and even-tempered ; a
man who despised flattery and hated meanness ; who
honoured the wise and distinguished the meritorious ;
who was indifferent to contemptible trifles, and inde-
fatigable in earnest business ; one, in short, " who had
a perfect and invincible soul," who, like Socrates, "was
able both to abstain from and to enjoy those things

"^hich many are too weak to abstain from and cannot

y2

268 MARCUS AURBLWS,

enjoy without excess.'"^ Piety, serenity, sweetness,
disregard of empty fame, calmness, simplicity,
patience, are virtues which he attributes to him in
another full-length portrait (vi. 30) which he con-
cludes with the words, " Imitate all this, that thou
mayest have as good a conscience when thy last
hour comes as he had."

He concludes these reminiscences of thankfulness
vvith a summary of what he owed to the gods. And
for what does he thank the gods .? for being wealthy,
and noble, and an emperor .? Nay, for no yigjgar or
dubious blessings such as these, but for the guidance
which trained him in philosophy, and for the grace
which kept him from sin. And here it is that
his genuine modesty comes out. As the excellent
divine used to say when he saw a criminal led
past for execution, " There, but for the grace ©f
God, goes John Bradford," so, after thanking the
gods for the goodness of all his family and relatives,
Aurelius says, " Further, I owe it to the gods that
I was not hurried into any offence against any of
them, though I had a disposition zvhich, if opportunity
had offered, might have led mS to do something of
this kind ; but through their favour there never was
such a concurrence of circumstances as put me to the
trial. Further, that I was subjected to a ruler and

* My quocations fr^^-... Marcus Aurelius will be made (by permission)
from the forcible and admirably accurate translation of Mr. Long.
In thanking Mr. Long, I may be allowed to add that the English
reader will find in his version the best means of becoming acquainted
with the purest and noblest book of antiquity.

THE EDUCA TION OF AN EMPEROR. 269

father who took away all pride from me, and taught
me that it was possible to live in a palace without
guards, or embroidered dresses, or torches, and statues,
and such-like show, but to live very near to the fashion
of a private person, without being either mean in
thought or remiss in action ; — that after having
fallen into amatory passions I was cured ; — that
though it was my mother's fate to die young, she
spent the last years of her life with me ; that, when-
ever I wished to help any man, I was never told that
I had not the means of doing it ; — that I had abund-
ance of good masters for my children : for all these
things require the help of the gods and fortune."

The whole of the Emperor's Meditations desei'\'e the
profound study of this age. The self-denial which
they display is a rebuke to our ever-growing luxury ;
their generosity contrasts favourably with the in-
creasing bitterness of our cynicism ; their contented
acquiescence in God's will rebukes our incessant
restlessness ; above all, their constant elevation
<ihames that multitude of little vices, and little mean-
nesses, which lie like a scurf over the conventionality
of modern life. But this earlier chapter has also a
special v^alue for the young. It offers a picture
which it would indeed be better for them and for us
(f they could be induced to study. If even under

"That fierce light that beats upon the throne,"

the life of Marcus Aurelius shows no moral stain, it
is still more remarkable that the free and beautiful
tx)yhood of this Roman prince had early learnt to

270 MARCUS AURELIUS.

recognise only the excellences of his teachers, theif
patience and firmness, their benevolence and sweet-
ness, their integrity and virtue. Amid the frightful
universality of moral corruption he preserved a stains-
less conscience and a most pure soul ; he thanked
God in language which breathes the most crystalline
delicacy of sentiment and language, that he had pre-
served uninjured the flower of his early life, and that
under the calm influences of his home in the country,
and the studies of philosophy, he had learnt to value
chastity as the sacred girdle of youth, to be retained
and honoured to his latest years. " Surely," says
Mr. Carlyle, " a day is coming when it will be known
again what virtue is in purity and continence of life ;
how divine is the blush of young human cheeks ; how
high, beneficent, sternly inexorable is the duty laid •
on every creature in regard to these particulars.
Well, if such a day never come, then I perceive much
else will never come. Magnanimity and depth of
msight will never come ; heroic purity of heart and of
eye ; noble pious valour to amend us and the age of
bronze and lacquers, how can they ever come 1 The
scandalous bronze-lacquer age of hungry animalisms,
spiritual impotencies, and mendacities will have to
run its course till the pit swallow it."

ANTONINUS PIUS.

CHAPTER II.

THE LIFE AND THOUGHTS OF MARCUS AURELIUS.

On the death of Hadrian in a. d. 138, Antoninus
Pius succeeded to the throne, and, in accordance
with the late Emperor's conditions, adopted Marcus
Aurelius and Lucius Commodus. Marcus had been
betrothed at the as^e of fifteen to the sister of Lucius
Commodus, but the new Emperor broke off the
engagement, and betrothed him instead to his
daughter Faustina. The marriage, however, was not
celebrated till seven years afterwards, A. D. 146.

The long reign of Antoninus Pius is one of those
happy periods that have no history. An almost
unbroken peace reigned at home and abroad. Taxes
were lightened, calamities relieved, informers dis-
couraged; confiscations were rare, plots and execu-
tions were almost unknown. Throughout the whole
extent of his vast domain the people loved and
valued their Emperor, and the Emperor's one aim
was to further the happiness of his people. He, too,
like Aurelius, had learnt that what was good for the
bee was good for the hive. He strove to live as the
civil administrator of an unaggressive and united

272 AfARCUS AuRELIUS.

Tepublic ; he disliked war, did not value the military
title of Imperator, and never deigned to accept a
triumph.

With this wise and eminent prince, who was as
amiable in his private relations as he was admirable
in the discharge of his public duties, Marcus Aurelius
spent the next twenty-three years of his life. So
close and intimate was their union, so completely did
they regard each other as father and son, that during
all that period Aurelius never slept more than twice
away from the house of Antoninus. There was not a
shade of jealousy between them ; each was the friend
and adviser of the other, and, so far from regarding
his destined heir with suspicion, the Emperor gave him
the designation " Cassar," and heaped upon him all
the honours of the Roman commonwealth. It was in
vain that the whisper of malignant tongues attempted
to shake this mutual confidence. Antoninus once
saw the mother of Aurelius in earnest prayer before
the statue of Apollo. " What do you think she is
praying for so intently .'' " asked a wretched mischief-
maker of the name of Valerius Omulus ; "it is that
you may die, and her son reign." This wicked
suggestion might have driven a prince of meaner
character into violence and disgust, but Antoninus
passed it over with the silence of contempt.

It was the main delight of Antoninus to enjoy the
quiet of his country villa. Unlike Hadrian, who
traversed immense regions of his vast dominion, Anto-
ninus lived entirely either at Rome, or in his beautiful
villa at Lorium, a little seacoast village about twelve

HIS LIFE AND THOUGHTS, rj-^

miles from the capital. In this villa he had been
born, and here he died, surrounded by the remi-
niscences of his childhood. In this his real home it
was his special pleasure to lay aside the pomp and
burden of his imperial rank. " He did not," says
Marcus, " take the bath at unseasonable hours ; he
was not fond of building houses, nor curious about
what he ate, nor about the texture and colour of his
clothes, nor about the beauty of his slaves." Even
the dress he wore was the work of the provincial
artist in his little native place. So far from dhecking
the philosophic tastes of his adopted son he fostered
them, and sent for Apollonius of Chalcis to be his
teacher in the doctrines of Stoicism. In one of his
notes to Pronto, Marcus draws the picture of their
simple country occupations and amusements. Hunt-
ing, fishing, boxing, wrestling, occupied the leisure
of the two princes, and they shared the rustic festi-
vities of the vintage. "I have dined," he writes, "on
a little bread. . . . We perspired a great deal, shouted
a great deal, and left some gleanings of the vintage
hanging on the trellis work. , . . When I got Jiome I
studied a little, but not to much advantage I had a
long talk with my mother, who was lying on her
couch." Who knows how r"'ich Aurelius anc how
much the world may have gained froni such con-
versation as this, with a mother from whom he had
learnt to hate even the thought of evil } Nor will
any one despise the simplicity of heart which
made him mingle with the peasants as an amateur
vintager, unless he is so tasteless and so morose as

274 MARCUS A URELIUS.

to think with scorn of Scipio and LseUus as they
gathered shells on the seashore, or of Henry IV. as
he played at horses with his little boys on all-fours.
The capability of unbending thus, the genuine cheer-
fulness which enters at due times into simple amuse-
ments, has been found not rarely in the highest and
purest minds.

For many years no incident of importance broke
the even tenor of Aurelius's life. He lived peaceful,
happy, prosperous, and beloved, watching without
envy the increasing years of his adopted father. But
in the year i6i, when Marcus was now forty years
old, Antoninus Pius, who had reached the age of
seventy-five, caught a fever at Lorium. Feeling that
his end was near, he summoned his friends and the
chief men of Rome to his bedside, and there (without
saying a word about his other adopted son, who is
generally known by the name of Lucius Verus)
solemnly recommended Marcus to them as his suc-
cessor ; and then, giving to the captain of the guard
the watchword of " Equanimity," as though his
earthly task was over he ordered to be transferred to
the bedroom of Marcus the little golden statue of
Fortune, which was kept in the private chamber of
the Emperors as an omen of public prosperity.

The very first public act of the new Emperor was
one of splendid generosity, namely, the admission of
his adoptive brother Lucius Verus into the fullest
participation of imperial honours, the Tribunitian
and Proconsular powers, and the titles Caesar and
Augustus The admission of Lucius Verus to a

HIS LIFE AND THOUGHTS. 275

share of the Empire was due to the innate modesty
of Marcus. As he was a devoted student, and cared
less for manly exercises, in which Verus excelled, he
thought that his adoptive brother would be a better
and more useful general than himself, and that he
could best serve the State by retaining the civil
administration, and entrusting to his brother the
management of war. Verus, however, as soon as he
got away from the immediate influence and ennobling
society of Marcus, broke loose from all decency, and
showed himself to be a weak and worthless personage,
as unfit for war as he was for all the nobler duties of
peace, and capable of nothing but enormous gluttony
and disgraceful self-indulgence. Two things only can
be said in his favour ; the one, that, though depraved,
he was wholly free from cruelty ; and the other, that
he had the good sense to submit himself entirely to
his brother, and to treat him with the gratitude and
deference which were his due.

Marcus had a large family by Faustina, and in the
first year of his reign his wife bore twins, of whom
the one who survived became the wicked and detested
Emperor Commodus. As though the birth of such
a child were in itself an omen of ruin, a storm of
calamity began at once to burst over the long
tranquil State. An inundation of the Tiber flung
down houses and streets over a great part of Rome,
swept away multitudes of cattle, spoiled the harvests,
devastated the fields, and caused a distress which
ended in wide-spread famine. Men's minds were
terrified by earthquakes, by the burning of cities, and

19 7'

275 MARC US A URELIUS,

by plagues of noxious insects. To these miseries,
which the Emperors did their best to alleviate, was
added the horror of wars and rumours of wars. The
Parthians, under their king Vologeses, defeated and
all but destroyed a Roman army, and devastated
with impunity the Roman province of Syria. The
wild tribes of the Catti burst over Germany with fire
and sword ; and the news from Britain was full of
insurrection and tumult. Such v/ere the elements of
trouble and discord which overshadowed the reign of
Marcus Aurelius from its very beginning down to its
weary close.

As the Parthian war was the most important of the
three, Verus was sent to quell it, and but for the
ability of his generals — the greatest of whom was
Avidius Cassius — would have ruined irretrievably the
fortunes of the Empire. These generals, however,
vindicated the majesty of the Roman name, and
Verus returned in triumph, bringing back with him
from the East the seeds of a terrible pestilence which
devastated the whole Empire and by which, on the
outbreak of fresh wars, Verus himself was carried off
at Aquileia.

Worthless as he was, Marcus, who, in his lifetime
had so often pardoned and concealed his faults, paid
him the highest honours of sepulture, and interred
his ashes in the mausoleum of Hadrian. There were
not wanting some who charged him with the guilt of
fratricide, asserting that the death of Verus had been
fastened by his means !

I have only one reason for alluding to atrocious

his LIFE AND THOUGHTS. 277

and contemptible calumnies like these, and that is
because — since no doubt such whispers reached hi?
ears — they help to account for that deep unutterable
melancholy which breathes through the little golden
book of the Emperor's Meditations. We find, for
instance, among them this isolated fragment : —

" A black character, a womanish character, a
stubborn character, bestial, childish, animal, stupid,
counterfeit, scurrilous, fraudulent, tyrannical."

We know not of whom he was thinking — perhaps
of Nero, perhaps of Caligula, but undoubtedly also of
men whom he had seen and known, and whose very
existence darkened his soul. The same sad spirit
breathes also through the following passages : —

" Soon, very soon, thou wilt be ashes, or a skeleton,
and either a name, or not even a name ; but name is
sound and echo. And the things which are nmch
valued in life are empty, and rotten, and trifling, and
little dogs biting one anotJicr, and little ckihh-en quarrel-
ling, langhingy and then straightway weeping. But
fidelity, and modesty, and justice, and truth are Jled

" ' Up to Olympus from the wide-spread earth.' "

(v. 33-)

*' It would be a man's happiest lot to depart from
mankind without having had a taste of lying, and
hypocrisy, and luxury, and pride. However, to
breathe out one^s life when a man has had enough of
those things is the next best voyage, as the saying
is." (ix. 2.)

" Enough of this wretched life, a?id tnunnuring, and

2/8 MARCUS AURELIUS.

apish trifles. Why art thou thus disturbed ? What
is there new in this ? What unsettles thee ? . . . .
Towards the gods, then, now become at last more
simple and better." (ix. 37.) The thought is like that
which dominates through the Penitential Psalms of
David, — that we m,ay take refuge from men, their
malignity ^nd their meanness, and find rest for our
souls in God. From men David has 710 hope ; mockery,
treachery, injustice, are all that he expects from them,
— the bitterness of his enemies, the far-off indifference
of his friends. Nor does this greatly trouble him, so
long as he does not wholly lose the light of God's
countenance. " I had no place to flee unto, and no
man cared for my soul. I cried unto thee, O Lord,
and said, Thotc art my hope, and my portion in
the land of the living." " Cast me not away
from Thy presence, and take not Thy Holy Spirit
from me."

But whatever may have been his impulse at times
to give up in despair all attempt to improve the ''little
breed " of men around him, Marcus had schooled his
gentle spirit to live continually in far other feelings.
Were men contemptible } It was all the more reason
why he should himself be noble. Were men petty,
and malignant, and passionate, and unjust } In that
proportion were they all the more marked out for pity
and tenderness, and in that proportion was he bound
to the utmost of his ability to show himself great, and
iorgiving, and calm, and true. Thus Marcus turns his
very bitterest experience to gold, and from the vile-
nesses of others, which depressed his lonely life, so far

HIS LIFE AND THOUGHTS. 27;

from suffering himself to be embittered as well as
saddened, he only draws fresh lessons of humanity
and love.

He says, for instance, *' Begin the morning by say-
ing to thyself, / shall meet with the busybody, the un-
grateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsociaL All
these things happen to them by reason o^ their ignoratice
of zvhat is good and evil. But I who have seen the
nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad
that it is ugly, and the nature of him that does wrong
that it is akin to me, . . . and that it partakes of the
same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured
by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is
ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate
him. For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like
hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and
lower teeth. To act against one another then is con-
trary to nature ; and it is acting against one another
to be vexed and turn away." (ii. i.) Another of his
rules, and an eminently wise one, was to fix his
thoughts as much as possible on the virtues of others,
rather than on their vices. " When thou wishest to
delight thyself, think of the virtues of those who live
with thee— the activity of one, the modesty of another,
the liberality of a third, and some other good quality
of a fourth." What a rebuke to the contemptuous
cynicism which we are daily tempted to display !
" An infinite being comes before us," says Robertson,
" with a whole eternity wrapt up in his mind and soul,
and we procred to classify him, put a label upon him, as
ive would upon a jar, saying, This is rice, that is jelly,

7/1

28o MARCUS AU RE LI US.

and this pomattun : and then we think v/e have saved
ourselves the necessity of taking off the cover. How
differently our Lord treated the people who came to
Him ! ... . consequently, at His touch each one gave
out his peculiar spark of light."

Here again is a singularly pithy, comprehensive,
and beautiful piece of advice : —

" Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach
them or bear with tJieinr (viii. 59.)

And again : " The best way of avenging thyself is
not to become like the wrong doer."

And again : " If any man has done wrong, the
harm is his own. But perhaps he has not done
wrong," (ix. 38.)

Most remarkable, however, are the nine rules which
he drew up for himself, as subjects for reflection when
any one had offended him, viz. —

1. That men were made for each other : even the
inferior for the sake of the superior, and these for the
sake of one another.

2. The invincible influences that act upon men, and
mould their opinions and their acts.

3. That sin is mainly error and ignorance, — an in-
voluntary slavery.

4. That we are ourselves feeble, and by no means
immaculate ; and that often our very abstinence from
faults is due more to cowardice and a care for our
reputation than to any freedom from the disposition
to commit them.

5. That our judgments are apt to be very rash and
premature. " And in short a man must learn a great

HIS LIFE AND THOUGHTS. 281

deal to enable him to pass a correct judgment on
another man's acts."

6. " When thou art much vexed or grieved, con-
sider that man's life is only a moment, and after a
short time we are all laid out dead."

7. That no wrongful act of another can brins; shame
on us, and that it is not men's acts which disturb us,
but our own opinions of them.

8. That our own anger hurts us more than the acts
themselves.

9. That benevolence is invincible, if it be not an
affected smile, nor acting a part. " For what will the
most violent man do to thee if thou continuest be-
nevolent to him } gently and calmly correcting him,
admonishing him when he is trying to do thee harm,

lying, ^ Not so, my child : we are constituted by natin-e
for something else : I shall certainly not be injured^
btit thoii art injuring thyself my child! And show
him with gentle tact and by general principles that
this is so, and that even bees do not do as he does,
nor any gregarious animal. And this you must
do simply, unreproachfuUy, affectionately ; without
rancour, and if possible when you and he are alone.'*
(xi. 18.)

^' Not so, my child ; thou art injuring thyself, my
child." Can all antiquity show anything tenderer
than this, or anything more close to the spirit of
Christian teaching than these nine rules 1 They were
worthy of the man who, unlike the Stoiqs in general,
considered gentleness to be a virtue, and a proof at
once of philosophy and of true manhood. They

282 MARCUS AURELIUS.

are written with that effusion of sadness and benevo*
lence to which it is difficult to find a parallel. They
show how completely Marcus had triumphed over all
petty malignity, and how earnestly he strove to fulfil
his own precept of always keeping the thoughts so
sweet and clear, that " if any one should suddenly
ask, * What hast thou now in thy thoughts ? ' with
perfect openness thou mightest immediately answer,
* This or That.' " In short, to give them their
highest praise, they would have delighted the great
Christian Apostle who wrote, —

" Warn them that are unruly, comfort the feeble-
minded, support the weak, be patient towards all
men,. See that none render evil for evil unto any
man ; but ever follow that which is good, both among
yourselves, and to all men." (i Thess. iv. 14, 15.)

" Count him not as an enemy, but admonish him -as
a brother." (2 Thess. iv. 15.)

" Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another,
if any man have a quarrel against any." (Col. iii. 13.)

Nay, are they not even in full accordance with the
mind and spirit of Him who said, —

" If thy brother trespass against thee, go and teh
hhn his fault between thee and Jiini alone: if he shall
hear thee thou hast gained thy brother !'

In the life of Marcus Aurelius, as in so many lives,
we are able to trace the great law of compensation.
His exalted station, during the later years of his life,
threw him ^mong many who were false and Phari-
saical and base ; but his youth had been spent under
happier conditions, and this saved him from falling

HJS LIFE AND THOUGHTS. 283

into the sadness of those whom neither man nor
woman please. In his earlier years it had been his
lot to see the fairer side of humanity, and the recol-
lection of those pure and happy days was like a
healing tree thrown into the bitter and turbid waters
of his reigii.

CHAPTER III.

THE LIFE AND THOUGHTS OF MARCUS AURELIUS {continued).

Marcus was now the undisputed lord of the Roman
world. He was seated on the dizziest and most
splendid eminence which it was possible for human
grandeur to obtain.

But this imperial elevation kindled no glow of
pride or self-satisfaction in his meek and chastened
nature. He regarded himself as being in fact the
servant of all. It was his duty, like that of the bull
in the herd, or the ram among the flocks, to confront
every peril in his own person, to be foremost in
all the hardships of war and most deeply immersed
in all the toils of peace. The registry of the citizens,
the suppression of litigation, the elevation of public
morals, the restraining of consanguineous marriages,
the care of minors, the retrenchment of public ex-
penses, the limitation of gladiatorial games and
shows, the care of roads, the restoration of senatorial
privileges, the appointment of none but worthy
magistrates — even the regulation of street • traffic —
these and numberless other duties so completely
absorbed his attention that, in spite of indifferent

HIS LIFE AND THOUGHTS. 2R?

health, they often kept him at severe labour from
early morning till long after midnight. His position
indeed often necessitated his presence at games and
shows, but on these occasions he occupied himself
either in reading, in being read to, or in writing notes.
He was one of those who held that nothing should
be done hastily, and that few crimes were worse than
the waste of time. It is to such views and such
habits that wc owe the composition of his works.
His Meditations were written amid the painful self-
denial and distracting anxieties of his wars with
the Ouadi and the Marcomanni, and he was the
author of other works which unhappily have perished.
Perhaps of all the lost treasures of antiquity there
are few which we should feel a greater wish to re-
cover than the lost autobiography of this wisest of
Emperors and holiest of Pagan men.

As for the external trappings of his rank, — those
gorgeous adjuncts and pompous circumstances which
excite the wonder and envy of mankind, — no man
could have shown himself more indifferent to them.
He recognised indeed the necessity of maintainino^
the dignity of his high position. " Every moment,"
he says, " think steadily as a Roman and a man
to do what thou Iiast in Jiand with perfect and simple
dignity y and affection, and freedom, and justice"
(ii. 5) ; and again, " Let the Deity which is in thee
be the guardian of a living being, K-ianly and of ripe
age, and^ engaged in matters political, and a Roman,
and a mler, who has taken his post like a man
waiting for the signal which summons him from

286 MARCUS AURELIUS.

life" (iii. 5). But he did not think it necessary
to accept the fulsome honours and ' degrading adu-
lations which were so dear to many of his prede-
cessors. He refused the pompous blasphemy of
temples and altars, saying that for every true ruler
the world was a temple, and all good men were
priests. He declined as much as possible all golden
statues and triumphal designations. All inevitable
luxuries or splendour, such as his public duties
rendered indispensable, he regarded as a mere hollow
show, Marcus Aurelius felt as deeply as our own
Shakespeare seems to have felt the unsubstantiality,
the fleeting evanescence of all earthly things : he
would have delighted in the sentiment that,

" We are such stiiff"
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded by a sleep."

" When we have meat before us," he says, *' and
such eatables, we receive the impression that this is
the dead body of a fish, and this is the dead body of
a bird, or of a pig ; and, again, that this Falernian
is only a little grape-juice, and this purple robe some
sheep s wool dyed ivith the blood of a shellfish: such
then are these impressions, and they reach the things
themselves and penetrate them, and so we see what
kind of things they are. Just in the same way ....
where there are things which appear most worthy of
our approbation, we ought to lay them bare, and look
at their worthlessness, and strip them of all the words
by which they are exalted." (vi. 13.)

" What is worth being valued ? To be received

HIS LIFE AND THOUGHTS. 287

with clapping of hands ? No. Neither must we
varlue the clapping of tongues, for the praise which
comes from the many is a clapping of tongues."
(vi. 16.)

" Asia, Europe, are corners of the universe ; all the
sea is a drop in the universe ; Athos a little clod
of the universe ; all the present time is a point in
eternity. All things are little^ changeable, peiHshable!'
(vi. 36.)

And to Marcus too, no less than to Shakespeare, it
seemed that —

" All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players ; "

for he writes these remarkable words : —

" The idle business of show, plays on the stage, flocks
of sheep, herds, exercises ivith spears, a bone cast to
little dogs, a bit of bread in fishponds, laboiirings of
ants, and burden-carrying runnings about of frightened
little mice, puppets pulled by strings — this is what life
resembles. It is thy duty then in the midst of such
things to show good humour, and not a proud air ;
to understand however that eveiy tnan is luorth just
so much as t/ic things are worth about ivhich lie busies
himself.''

In fact, the Court was to Marcus a burden ; he
tells us himself that Philosophy was his mother,
Empire only his stepmother ; it was only his repose
in the one that rendered even tolerable to him the
burdens of the other. Emperor as he was, he thanked
the gods for having enabled him to enter into the
souls of a Thrasea, an Helvidius, a Cato, a Brutus.

24

288 MARCUS AURELIUS.

Above all, he seems to have had a horror of ever
becoming like some of his predecessors ; he writes : —

" Take care that thou art not made into a Caesar ;*
take care thou art not dyed with this d^y^. - Keep
thyself then simple, good, pure, serious, free from
affectation, a friend of justice, a worshipper of the
gods, kind, affectionate, strenuous in all proper acts.
Reverence the gods and help men. Short is life.
There is only 07ie fruit of this ten'ene life^ a pious
disposition and social acts!' (iv. 19.)

It is the same conclusion as that which sorrow
forced from another weary and less admirable king :
" Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter :
Fear God, and keep His commandments ; for this is
the whole duty of man."

But it is time for us to continue the meagre record
of the life of Marcus, so far as the bare and gossiping
compilations of Dion Cassius,-f and Capitolinus, and
the scattered allusions of other writers can enable us
to do so.

It must have been with a heavy heart that he set
out once more for Germany to face the dangerous
rising of the Quadi and Marcomanni. To obtain
soldiers sufficient to fill up the vacancies in his army
which had been decimated by the plague, he was
forced to enrol slaves ; and to obtain money he had

* Marcus liere invents what M. Martha justly calJs " an admirable
barbarism" to express his disgust towards such men — upo. a^ ciiro«a«'
traodGrii — " take care not to be Ccrsar/sed."

+ As epitomised by Xiphi-linus.

HIS LIFE AND THOUGHTS. 2S9

to sell the ornaments of the palace, and even some of
the Empress's jewels. Immediately before he started
his heart was wrung by the death of his little boy,
the twin-brother of Commodus, whose beautiful
features are still preserved for us on coins. Early
in the war, as he was trying the depth of a ford, he
was assailed by the enemy with a sudden storm of
missiles, and was only saved from imminent deatli
by being sheltered beneath the shields of his soldiers.
One battle was fought on the ice of the wintry
Danube. But by far the most celebrated event of
the war took place in a great victory over the Quadi
which he won in A.D. 174, and which was attributed
by the Christians to what is known as the " Miracle
of the Thundering Legion."

Divested of all extraneous additions, the fact which
occurred, — as established by the evidence of medals,
and by one of the bassi-relievi on the " Column of
Antonine," — appears to have been as follows. Marcus
Aurelius and his army had been entangled in a
mountain defile, into which they had too hastily
pursued a sham retreat of the barbarian archers. In
this defile, unable either to fight or to fly, pent in by
the enemy, burned up with the scorching heat and
tormented by thirst, they lost all hope, burst into
wailing and groans, and yielded to a despair from
whicii not even the strenuous efforts of Marcus could
arouse them. At the most critical moment of their
danger and misery the clouds began to gather, and
heavy showers of rain descended, which the soldiers
caught in their shields and helmets to quench their

290 MARCUS AUREUUS,

own thirst and that of their horses. While they
were thus engaged the enemy attacked them ; but
the rain was mingled with hail, and fell with blinding
fury in the faces of the barbarians. The storm was
also accompanied with thunder and lightning, which
seems to have damaged the enemy, and filled them
with terror, while no casualty occurred in the Roman
ranks. The Romans accordingly regarded this as
a Divine interposition, and achieved a fnost decisive
victory, which proved to be the practical conclusion
of a hazardous and important war.

The Christians regarded the event not 2i% providential
hut as miraculous, and attributed it to the prayers of
their brethren in a legion which, from this circum-
stance, received the name of the ** Thundering Le-
gion." It is however now known that one of the
legions, distinguished by a flash of lightning which
was represented on their shields, had been known by
this name since the time of Augustus ; and the
Pagans themselves attributed the assistance which
they had received sometimes to a prayer of the pious
Emperor and sometimes to the incantations of ar
Egyptian sorcerer named Arnuphis.

One of the Fathers, the passionate and eloquent
TertuUian, attributes to this deliverance an interpo-
sition of the Emperor in favour of the Christians, and
appeals to a letter of his to the Senate in which he
acknowledged how effectual had been the aid he had
received from Christian prayers, and forbade any one
hereafter to molest the followers of the new relifrion,
lest they should use against him the weapon of suppH-

HIS LIFE AND THOUGHTS. 291

cation which had been so powerful in his favour. This
letter is preserved at the end of the Apology of Justin
Martyr, and it adds that, not only are no Christians
to be injured or persecuted, but that any one who
informed against them is to be burned alive ! We
see at once that this letter is one of those impudent
and transparent forgeries in which the literature of
the first five centuries unhappily abounds. What
was the real relation of Marcus to the Christians we
shall consider hereafter.

To the gentle heart of Marcus, all war, even when
accompanied with victories, was eminently distasteful ;
and in such painful and ungenial occupations no
small part of his life was passed. What he thought
of war and of its successes is graphically set forth
in the following remark : —

" A spider is proud when it has caught a fly, and
another when he has caught a poor hare, and another
when he has taken a little fish in a net, and another
when he has taken wild boars or bears, a7td ajiotJier
when he has taken Sarmatians. Are not these robbers,
v/hen thou examinest their principles.'"' He here
condemns his own involuntary actions ; but it was his
unhappy destiny not to have trodden out the embers
of this war before he was burdened with another far
more painful and formidable.

This was the revolt of Avidius Cassius, a general
of the old blunt Roman type, whom, in spite of some
ominous warnings, Marcus both loved and trusted.
The ingratitude displayed by such a man causeH
Marcus the deepest anguish ; but he was saved trora
20 2a'2

292 MARCUS AURELIUS.

all dangerous consequences by the wide-spread affec
tion which he had inspired by his virtuous reign.

The very soldiers of the rebellions general fell away
from him; and, after he had been a nominal Emperor
for only three months and six days, he was assassi-
nated by some of his own officers. His head was sent
to Marcus, who received it with sorrow, and did not
hold out to the murderers the slightest encourage-
ment. The joy of success was swallowed up in
regret that his enemy had not lived to allow him the
luxury of a genuine forgiveness. He begged the
Senate to pardon all the family of Cassius, and to
suffer this single life to be the only one forfeited in
consequence of civil war. The Fathers received these
proofs of clemency with the rapture which they
deserved, and the Senate-house resounded with accla-
mations and blessings.

Never had a formidable conspiracy been more
quietly and effectually crushed. Marcus travelled
through the provinces which had favoured the cause
of Avidius Cassius, and treated them all with the
most complete and indulgent forbearance. When he
arrived in Syria, the correspondence of Cassius was
brought to him, and, with a glorious magnanimity of
which history affords but few examples, he consigned
it all to the flames unread.

During this journey of pacification, he lost his wife
Faustina, who died suddenly in ore of the valleys of
Mount Taurus. History, or the collection of anec-
dotes which at this period often passes as history,
has assigned to Faustina a character of the darkest

HIS LIFE AND THOUGH! S. 293

intamy, and it has even been made a charge against
AureHus that he overlooked or condoned her offences.
As far as Faustina is concerned, we have not much to
say, although there is strong reason to believe that
many of the stories told of her are scandalously ex-
aggerated, if not absolutely false. Certain it is, that
most of the imputations upon her memory rest on the
malignant anecdotes recorded by Dion, who dearly
loved every piece of scandal which degraded human
nature. The specific charge brought against her of
having tempted Cassius from his allegiance is wholly
unsupported, even if it be not absolutely incompatible
with what we find in her own extant letters ; and,
finally, Marcus himself not only loved her tenderly,
as the kind mother of his eleven children, but in his
Meditations actually thanks the gods for having
granted him " such a wife, so obedient, so affectionate,
and so simple." No doubt Faustina was unworthy of
her husband ; but surely it is the glory and not the
shame of a noble nature to be averse from jealousy
and suspicion, and to trust to others more deeply than
t'hey deserve.

So blameless was the conduct of Marcus Aurelius
that neither the malignity of contemporaries nor the
spirit of posthumous scandal has succeeded in dis-
covering any flaw in the extreme integrity of his life
and principles. But meanness will not be baulked of
its victims. The hatred of all excellence which made
Caligula try to put down the memory of great men
rages, though less openly, m the minds of many.
Tiioy delight to degrade human life into that dulj

394 MARCUS AURRLWS,

and barren plain " in which every molehill is a
mountain, and every thistle a forest-tree." Great
men are as small in their eyes as they are said to be
in the eyes of their valets ; and there are multitudes
who, if they find

" Some stain or blemish in a name of note,
Not grieving that their greatest are so small,
Inflate themselves with some insane delight,
And judge all nature from her feet of clay,
Without the will to lift their eyes, and see
Her godlike head crown'd with spiritual fire,
And touching other worlds. "

This I suppose is the reason why, failing to drag
down Marcus Aurelius from his moral elevation, some
have attempted to assail his reputation because of
the supposed vileness of Faustina and the actual
depravity of Commodus. Of Faustina I have spoken
already. Respecting Commodus, I think it sufficient
to ask with Solomon : " Who knoweth whether his
son shall be a wise man or a fool ?" Commodus was
but nineteen when his father died ; for the first three
years of his reign he ruled respectably and acceptably.
Marcus Aurelius had left no effort untried to have
him trained aright by the first teachers and the wisest
men whom the age produced ; and Herodian dis-
tinctly tells us that he had lived virtuously up to
the time of his father's death. Setting aside natural
affection altogether, and even assuming (as I should
conjecture from one or two passages of his Medi'-
tations) that Marcus had misgivings about his son,
would it have been easy, would it have been even
possible, to set aside on general grounds a son who

HIS LIFE AND THOUGHTS. 295

had attained to years of maturity ? However this
may be, if there are any who think it worth while
to censure Marcus because, after all, Commodus
turned out to be but "a warped slip of wilderness,"
their censure is hardly sufficiently discriminating to
deserve the trouble of refutation.

" But Marcus Aurelius cruelly persecuted the
Christians." Let us briefly consider this charge.
That persecutions took place in his reign is an
undeniable fact, and is sufficiently evidenced by the
Apologies of Justin Martyr, of Melito Bishop of
Sardis, of Athenagoras, and of Apollinarius, as well
as by the Letter of the Church of Smyrna describing
the martyrdom of Polycarp, and that of the Churches
of Lyons and Vienne to their brethren in Asia Minor.
It is fair, however, to mention that there is some
documentary evidence on the other side ; Lactantius
clearly asserts that under the reigns of those excellent
princes who succeeded Domitian the Church suffered
no violence from her enemies, and " spread her hands
towards the East and the West :" Tertullian, writine
but twenty years after the death of Marcus, distinctly
says (and Eusebius quotes the assertion), that there
were letters of the Emperor, in which he not only
attributed his aelivery among the Quadi to the
prayers of Christian soldiers in the "Thundering
Legion," but ordered any who informed against the
Christians to be most severely punished ; and at the
end of the works of Justin Martyr is found a letter
of similar purport, which is asserted to have been
addressed by Marcus to the Senate of Rome. We

296 MARCUS AURELIUS.

may set aside these peremptory testimonies, we may
believe that TertuUian and Eusebius were mistaken,
and that the documents to which they referred were
spurious ; but this should make us also less certain
about the prominent participation of the Emperor in
these persecutions. My own belief is (and it is a
belief v/hich could be supported by many critical
arguments), that his share in causing them was almost
infinitesimal. If those who love his memory reject
the evidence of Fathers in his favour, they may be at
least permitted to withhold assent from some of the
assertions in virtue of which he is condemned.

Marcus in his Meditations alludes to the Chris-
tians once only, and then it is to make a passing
complaint of the indifference to death, which ap-
peared to him, as it appeared to Epictetus, to arise, not
from any noble principles, but from mere obstinacy
and perversity. That he shared the profound dislike
with wdiich Christians were regarded is very probable.
.That he was a cold-blooded and virulent persecutor
is utterly unlike his whole character, essentially at
variance with his habitual clemency, alien to the
spirit which made hiim interfere in every possible
instance to mitigate the severity of legal punishments,
and may in 'short be regarded as an assertion which
is altogether false. Who will believe that a man who
during his reign built and dedicated but one single
temple, and that a Temple to Beneficence ; fliat a
man who so far from showing any jealousy respecting
foreign religions allowed honour to be paid to them
all ; that a man whose writings breathe on every

HIS LIFE AND THOUGHTS. 297

page the inmost spirit of philanthropy and tender-
ness, went out of his way to join in a persecution of
the most innocent, the most courageous, and the
most inoffensive of his subjects ?

The true state of the case seems to have been this.
The deep calamities in which, during the whole reign
of Marcus the Empire was involved, caused wide-
spread distress, and roused into peculiar fury the
feelings of the provincials against men whose atheism
(for such they considered it to be) had kindled the
anger of the gods. This fury often broke out into
paroxysms of popular excitement, which none but
the firmest-minded governors were able to moderate
or to repress. Marcus, when appealed to, simply let
the existing law take its usual course. That law was
as old as the time of Trajan. The younger Pliny,
Governor of Bithynia, had written to ask Trajan how
he was to deal with the Christians, whose blameless-
ness of life he fully admitted, but whose doctrines,
he said, had emptied the temples of the gods, and
exasperated their worshippers. Trajan, in reply, had
ordered that the Christians should not be soiigJit for^
but that, if they were brought before the governor,
and proved to be contumacious in refusing to abjure
their religion, they were then to be put to death.
Hadrian and Antoninus Pius had continued the same
policy, and Marcus Aurelius saw no reason to alter it.
But this law, which in quiet times might become a
mere dead letter, might at more troubled periods be
converted into a dangerous engine of persecution, as
it was in the case of the venerable Polycarp, and in

298 MARCUS AURELIUS.

the unfortunate Churches of Lyons and Vienne. The
Pagans beheved that the reason why their gods were
sniib'ng in secret, — •

" Looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery

sands,
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying

hands," —

was the unbelief and impiety of these hated Gahleans,
causes of offence which could only be expiated by
the death of the guilty. " Their enemies," says
TertuUian, " call aloud for the blood of the innocent,
alleging this vain pretext for their hatred, that they
believe the Christians to be the cause of every public
misfortune. If the Tiber has overflowed its banks,
or the Nile has not overflowed, if heaven has refused
its rain, if famine or the plague has spread its
ravages, the cry is immediate, ' The Christians to the
lions.' " In the flrst three centuries the cry of " No
Christianity" became at times as brutal, as violent,
and as unreasoning as the cry of " No Popery " has
often been in modern days. It was infinitely less
dissfraceful to Marcus to lend his ear to the one than
it has been to some eminent modern statesmen to be
carried away by the insensate fury of the other.

To what extent is Marcus Aurelius to be con-
demned for the martyrdoms which took place in his
reign t Not, I think, heavily or indiscriminately, or
with vehement sweeping censure. Common justice
surely demands that we should not confuse the present
with the past, or pass judgment on the conduct of the
Emperor as though he were living in the nineteenth

HIS UFE AND THOUGHTS. zgo

century, or as though he had been acting in full
cognisance of the Gospels and the stories of the Saints
Wise and good men before him had, in their haughty
ignorance, spoken of Christianity with execration and
contempt. The philosophers who surrounded his
throne treated it with jealousy and aversion. The
body of the nation firmly believed the current
rumours which charged its votaries with horrible mid-
night assemblies, rendered infamous by Thyestian
banquets and the atrocities of nameless superstitions.
These foul calumnies — these hideous charges of can-
nibalism and incest, — were supported by the reiterated
perjury of slaves under torture, which in that age, as
well as long afterwards, was preposterously regarded
as a sure criterion of truth.

Christianity in that day was confounded with a
multitude of debased and foreign superstitions ; and
the Emperor in his judicial capacity, if he ever
encountered Christians at all, was far more likely to
encounter those who were unworthy of the name, than
to become acquainted with the meek, unworldly,
retiring virtues of the calmest, the holiest, and the
best. When we have given their due weight to con-
siderations such as these we shall be ready to pardon
Marcus Aurelius for having, in this matte;, acted
ignorantly, and to admit that in persecuting Chris-
tianity he may most honestly have thought that he
was doing God service. The very sincerity of his
belief, the conscientiousness of his rule, tlie intensity
of his philanthropy, the grandeur of his own philo
ao'jhical tenets, all conspired to make him a worse

2b

3cx> MARCUS A URELIUS.

enemy of the Church than a brutal Commodus or a
disgusting Heliogabalus. And yet that there was not
in him the least pi'opcnsiiy to persecute ; that tRese
persecutions were for the most p'art spontaneous and
accidental ; that they were in no measure due to his
direct instigation, or in special accordance with his
desire, is clear from the fact that the martyrdoms
took place in Gaul and Asia Minor, not in Rome.
There must have been hundreds of Christians in
Rome, and under the very eye of the Emperor ; nay,
there were even multitudes of Christians in his own
army ; yet we never hear of his having molested any
of them. Melito, bishop of Sardis, in addressing the
Emperor, expresses a doubt as to whether he was
really aware of the manner in which his Christian
subjects were treated. Justin Martyr, in his Apology,
addresses him in terms of perfect confidence and deep
respect. In short he was in this matter " blameless,
but unfortunate." It is painful to think that the
venerable Poly carp and the thoughtful Justin may
have forfeited their lives for their principles, not only
in the reign of so good a man, but even by virtue
of his authority ; but we must be very uncharitable
or very unimaginative if we cannot readily believe
that, though they had received the crown of martyr-
dom from his hands, the redeemed spirits of those
great martyrs would have been the first to welcome
this holiest of the heathen into the presence of a
Saviour whose Church he persecuted, but to whose
indwelling Spirit his virtues were due, whom igno-
rantly and unconsciously he worshipped, and whom,

HIS LIFE AND THOUGHTS. 301

had he ever heard of Him and known Him, he would
have loved in his heart and glorified by the con-
sistency of his noble and stainless life.

The persecution of the Churches in Lyons and
Vienne happened in A.D. 177. Shortly after this
period fresh wars rrralled th? Fmperor to the North.
It is said that, in despair of ever seeing him again,
the chief men of Rome entreated him to address
them his farewell admonitions, and thai* for three
days he discoursed to them on philosophic questions.
When he arrived at the seat of war, victory again
crowned his arms. But Marcus w^as now getting old,
and he was worn out with the toils, trials, and travels
of his long and weary life. He sunk under mental
anxieties and bodily fatigues, and after a brief illness
died in Pannonia, either at Vienna or at Sirmium, on
March 17, A.D. 180, in the fifty-ninth year of his age
and the twentieth of his reign.

Death to him was no calamity. He was sadly
aware that ** there is no man so fortunate that there
shall not be by him when he is dying some who are
pleased with what is going to happen. Suppose that
he was a good and wise man, will there not be at last
some one to say of him, * Let us at last breathe freely,
being relieved from this schoolmaster. It is true that
he was harsh to none of us, but I perceive that he
tacitly condemns us.' . . . Thou wilt consider this
when thou art dying, and wilt depart more content-
edly by reflecting thus : * I am going ^w^iy from a life
in which even my associates, on beJiaJf of zvhom I have
striven, and cared, and prayed so much, themselves wish

302 MARCUS AUKELJUS.

me to depart, hoping perchance to get some little
advantage by it' Why then should a man cling to
a longer stay here ? Do not, hozvever, for tins reason
go away less kindly disposed to them, but preserving thy
own character, and continuing friendly, and benevolent^
and kindr And dreading death far less than he
dreaded any departure from the laws of virtue, he
exclaims, " Come quickly, O Death, for fear that at
last I should forget myself" This utterance has been
v/ell compared to the language which Bossuet put
into the mouth of a Christian soul : — " O Death, thou
dost not trouble my designs, thou accomplishest them.
Haste then, O favourable Death ! . . . Nnnc dimittisr
A nobler, a gentler, a purer, a sweeter soul, — a soul
less elated by prosperity, or more constant in adversity
— a soul more fitted by virtue, and chastity, and self-
denial to enter into the eternal peace, never passed
into the presence of its Heavenly Father. We are
not surprised that all, whose means permitted it, pos-
sessed themselves of his statues, and that they were
to be seen for years afterwards among the household
gods of heathen families, who felt themselves more
hopeful and more happy frorn the glorious sense ot
possibility which was inspired by the memory of one
who, in the midst of difficulties, and breathing an
atmosphere heavy with corruption, yet showed him-
self sc wise, so great, so good a man.

'' O framed for nobler times and calmer hearts !
O studious thinker eloquent for truth !
Philosopher, despising wealth and death,
But patient, childlike, full of life and love I

CHAPTER IV.

THE "MEDITATIONS" OF MARCUS AURELIUS.

Emperor as he was, Marcus Aurelius found himself
in a hollow and troublous world ; but he did not give
himself up to idle regret or querulous lamentations.
If these sorrows and perturbations came from the
gods, he kissed the hand that smote him; *'he de-
livered up his broken sword to Fate the conqueror
with a humble and a manly heart." In any case he
had duties to do, and he set himself to perform them
with a quiet heroism— zealously, conscientiously, even
cheerfully.

The principles of the Emperor are not reducible to
the hard and definite lines of a philosophic system,
l^ut the great laws which guided his actions and
moulded his views of life were few and simple, and in
his book of Meditations, which is merely his private
diary written to relieve his mind amid all the trials of
war and government, he recurs to them again and
again. " Plays, war, astonishment, torpor, slavery,"
he says to him.self, " will wipe out those holy prin-
ciples of thine ;" and this is why he committed those
principles to writing. Some of these I have already

2h2

304 MARCUS A URELIUS.

adduced, and others I proceed to quote, availing
myself, as before, of the beautiful and scholar-like
translation of Mr. George Long.

All pain, and misfortune, and ugliness seemed to
the Emperor to be most wisely regarded under a
threefold aspect, name.lv, if considered in reference to
the gods, as being due to laws beyond their control ;
if considered with reference to the nature of things,
as being subservient and necessary ; and if considered
with reference to ourselves, as being dependent on
the amount of indifference and fortitude with which
we endure them.

The following passages will elucidate these points
of view : —

" The intelligence of the Universe is social. Ac-
cordingly it has made the inferior things for the sake
of the superior, and it has fitted the superior to one
another." (v. 30.)

" Things do not touch the soul, for they are eternal,
and remain immovable ; but our perturbations come
only from the opinion which is within. . . . TJie Uni-
verse is transformation ; life is opinion^ (iv. 3.)

" To the jaundiced honey tastes bitter, and to those
bitten by mad dogs water causes fear ; and to little
children the ball is a fine thing. Why then am I
angry } Dost thou think that a false opinion has less
power than the bile in the jaundiced, or the poison in
him who is bitten by a mad dog-?*' (vi. 52.)

" How easy it is to repel and to wipe away every
impression which is troublesome and unsuitable, and
immediately to be at tranquillity." (v. 2.)

HJS « M EDIT A TIONSP 305

The passages in which Marcus speaks of evil as a
relative thing, — as being good in the making, — the
unripe and bitter bud of that which shall be here-
after a beautiful flower,— although not expressed with
perfect clearness, yet indicate his belief that our view
of evil things rises in great measure from our inability
to perceive the great whole of which they are but
subservient parts,

"AH things," he says, "come from that universal
ruling power, either directly or by way of consequence.
And accordingly the lions gaping jaivs, a?id that which
is poisonous, and every hurtful thing, as a thorn, as
vtud, are after-products of the grand and beautiful.
Do not therefore imagine that they are of another
kind from that which thou dost venerate, but form a
just opinion of the source of all."

In another curious passage he says that all things
which are natural and congruent with the causes
which produce them have a certain beauty and
attractiveness of their own ; for instance, the split-
tings and corrugations on the surface of bread when
it has been baked. "And again, figs when they are
quite ripe gape open ; and in the ripe olives the very
circumstance of their being near to rottenness adds a
peculiar beauty to the fruit. And the ears of corn
bending doivn, and the lion's eyebi^oivs, and the foam
which floivs from the mouth of wild boars, and manv
other things— though they are far from beii;g beau-
tiful, if a man should examine them severally — still
becau.sc they are consequent upon the things which
are formed by nature, help to adorn fliem, and they

306 MARCUS A URELIUS.

please the mind ; so that if a man should have a
feeling and deeper insight about the things found in
the universe there is hardly 07ic of those whicJi follow
by way of consequence which will not seem to him to
be in a manner disposed so as to give pleasure." (iv. 2.)

This congruity to nature — the following of nature,
and obedience to all her laws — is the key-formula to
the doctrines of the Roman Stoics.

" Everything which is in any way beautiful is beau-
tiful in itself, and terminates in itself, not having
praise as part of itself. Neither worse, then, nor
better is a thing made by being praised . ... Is such
a thing as an emerald made worse than it was, if it is
not praised? or gold, ivoiy, pnrple, a lyre, a little knife ^
a flower, a shrnb ? '' (iv, 20.)

" Everything harmonizes with me which is har-
monious to thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too
early nor too late, which is in due time for thee.
Everything is fruit to me which thy seasons bring,
O Nature ! from thee are all things, in thee are all
things, to thee all things return. The poet says. Dear
city of Cecrops ; and will not thou say. Dear city of
God?'' (iv. 23.)

" Willingly give thyself up to fate, allowing her to
spin thy thread into whatever thing she pleases." (iv. 34.)

And here, in a very small matter — getting out of
bed in a morning — is one practical application of the
formula : —

" In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let
tliese thoughts be present — ' I am rising to the work
(fa human being. Why, then, am I dissatisfied if I

ms " MED IT A TIONSr 307

am going to do the tilings for ivJiich I exist, aiid for
which I zvas brought if? to the world? Or have I been
made for this, to lie in the bedclothes and keep myself
warm ?' • But this is more pleasant* Dost thou exist,
then, to take thy pleasure, a? id not for action or
exertion? Dost thou not see the little plants, the
little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees, working
together to put in order their several parts of the
universe ? And art thou unwilling to do the work of
a human being, and dost thou not make haste to do
that which is according to thy nature ? " (v. i.) [" Go
to the ant, thou sluggard ; consider her ways, and be
wise ! "]

The same principle, that Nature has assigned to us
our proper place— that a task has been given us to
perform, and that our only care should be to perform
it aright, for the blessing of the great Whole of which
we are but insignificant parts— dominates through the
admirable precepts which the Emperor lays down for
the regulation of our conduct towards others. Some
men, he says, do benefits to others only because they
expect a return ; some men even, if they do not
demand any return, are not forgetful that they have
rendered a benefit ; but others do not even know
what they have done, but are like a vine which has
produced grapes, and seeks for 710 thing more after it has
produced its proper fruit. So we ought to do good to
others as simply and as naturally as a horse runs, or
a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season
after season, without thinking of the grapes which it
has borne. And in another passage, " What more

3o8 MARCUS AURELIUS.

dost thou want when thou hast done a service to
another ? Art thou not content to have done an act
conformable to thy nature, and must thou seek to be
paid for it, just as if the eye demanded a reward for
seeing, or the feet for walking ? "

"Judge every word and deed which is according to
nature to be fit for thee, and be not diverted by the
blame which follows .... but if a thing is good to
be done or said, do not consider it unworthy of thee."

(v. 3.)

Sometimes, indeed, Marcus Aurelius wavers. The
evils of life overpower him. *' Such as bathing appears
to thee," he says, " oil, szveat, dirt, filthy water, all
things disgusting — so is every part of life and every-
thing'' (viii. 24); and again: — "Of human life the
time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and
the perception dull, and the composition of the whole
body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and
fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of
judgment". But more often he retains his perfect
tranquillity, and says, " Either thou livest here, and
hast already accustomed thyself to it, or thou art
going away, and this was thine own will ; or thou art
dying, and hast discharged thy duty. But besides
these things tJiere is nothing. Be of good cheer, tJie^i^
(x. 22.) "Take me, and cast me where thou wilt, for
tlien I shall keep my divine part tranquil, that is, con-
tent, if it can feel and act conformably to its proper
constitution." Tviii. 45.)

There is something delightful in the fact that even
in the Stoic philosophy there was some comfort to

HIS " M EDIT A 7 IONS." 3D<,

keep men from despair. To a holy and scrupulous
conscience like that of Marcus, there would have been
an inestimable preciousness in tlic Christian doctrine
of the " forgiveness of oins." Of that divine mercy —
of that sin-uncrcating power — the ancient world knew
nothing; but in Marcus we find some dim and faint
adumbration of the doctrine, expressed in a manner
which might at least breathe calm into the spirit of
the philosopher, though it could never reach the hearts
of the suffering multitude. For " suppose," he says,
"that thou hast detached thyself from the natural
unity,— for thou wast made by nature a part, but now
hast cut thyself ofC —jye^ /lere is the beautiful provision
that it is in thy power again to unite thyself. God
has allowed this to no other part — after it has been
separated and cut asunder, to come together again.
But consider the goodness with whieJi He has privileged
7nan ; for He has put it in his pozver, ivJien he has been
separated, to return and to be reunited, and to resume
his place'' And elsewhere he says, "If you cannot
maintain a true and magnanimous character, go
courageously into some corner where you can main-
tain them ; or if even there you fail, depart at once
from life, not with passion, but with modest and
simple freedom — which will be to have done at least
ofte laudable act." Sad that even to Marcus Aurelius
death should have seemed the only refuge from the
despair of ultimate failure in the struggle to be wise
and good !

Marcus valued temperance and self-denial as beincc
the best means of keeping his heart strong and pure ;

3IO MARCUS AURELIUS.

but we are glad to learn he did not value the rigours
of asceticism. Life brought with it enough, and more
than enough, of antagonism to brace his nerves ;
enough, and more than enough, of the rough wind
of adversity in his face to make it unnecessary to
add more by his own actions. " It is not fit," he
says, " that I should give myself pain, for I have
never intentionally given pain even to another."
(viii. 42.)

It was a commonplace of ancient philosophy that
the life of the wise man should be a contemplation of,
and a preparation for, death. It certainly was so
with Marcus Aurelius. The thoughts of the nothing-
ness of man, and of that great sea of oblivion which
shall hereafter swallow up all that he is and does, are
ever present to his mind ; they are thoughts to which
he recurs more constantly than any other, and from
which he always draws the same moral lesson.

" Since it is possible that thou mayest depart from
life this very moment, regulate every act and thought
accordingly .... Death certainly, and life, honour
and dishonour, pain and pleasure, all these things
happen equally to good men and bad, being things
which make us neither better nor worse. Therefore
they are neither good nor evil." (ii. li.)

Elsewhere he says that Hippocrates cured diseases
and died ; and the Chaldaeans foretold the future and
died ; and Alexander, and Pompey, and Caesar killed
thousands, and then died ; and lice destroyed De-
mocritus, and other lice killed Socrates ; and Augustus,
and his wife, and daughter, and all his descendants,

HJS " M EDIT A T/ONS." 3 1 1

and all his ancestors, are dead ; and Vespasian and
all his Court, and all who in his day feasted, and
married, and were sick and chaffered, and fought,
and flattered, and plotted, and grumbled, and wished
other people to die, and pined to become kings or
consuls, are dead ; and all the idle people who are
doing the same things now are doomed to die ; and
all human things are smoke, and nothing at ail ;
and it is not for us, but for the gods, to settle
whether we play the play out, or only a part of
it. " TJiere are many grains of frankincense on the
same altar ; one falls before, another falls after;
but it makes no difference!' And the moral of all
these thoughts is, " Death hangs ov^er thee while thou
livest: while it is in thy power be good." (iv. 17.)
"Thou hast embarked, thou hast made the voyage,
thou hast come to shore ; get out. If, indeed, to
another life there is no want of gods, not even there.
But if to a state without sensation, thou wilt. cease to
be held by pains and pleasures." (iii. 3.)

Nor was Marcus at all comforted under present
annoyances by the thought of posthumous fame.
" How ephemeral and worthless human things are,"
he says, " and what was yesterday a little mucus,
to-morrow will be a mummy or ashes." " Many who
are now praising thee, will very soon blame thee, and
neither a posthumous name is of any value, nor
reputation, nor anything else." What has become
of all great and famous? jnen, and all they desired,
and all they loved } They are " smoke, and ash.
and a tale, or not even a tale." After all their

2 c

3 1 2 MARCUS A URELIUS.

rages and envyings, men are stretched out quiet
and dead at last. Soon thou wilt have forgotten
all, and soon all will have forgotten thee. But here,
again, after such thoughts, the same moral is always
introduced again : — " Pass then through the little
space of time conformably to nature, and end the
journey in content, just as mi olwe falls off zv/ien it
is ripe^ blessing nature who produced it, and thanking
the tree on which it grew T " One thing only troubles
me, lest I should do something which the constitution
of man does not allow, or in the way which it does
not allow, or what it does not allow now."

To quote the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius is to me
a fascinating task. But I have already let him speak
so largely for himself that by this time the reader
will have some conception of his leading motives.
It only remains to adduce a few more of the weighty
and golden sentences in which he lays down his rule
of life.

" To say all in a word, everything which belongs to
the body is a stream, and what belongs to the soul is
a dream and vapour ; and life is a warfare, and a
stranger's sojourn, and after fame is oblivion. What,
then, is that which is able to enrich a man .? One
thing, and only one — philosophy. But this consists
in keeping the guardian spirit within a man free from
violence and unharmed, superior to pains and plea-
sures, doing notJiing without a purpose, nor yet falsely,
and with Jiypocrisy .... accepting all that happens
and all that is allotted .... and finally waiting for
death ivith a cheerful mind!' (ii. 17.)

HIS '' meditations:' 313

" If thou findest in human life anything better than
justice, truth, temperance, fortitude, and, in a word,
than thine own soul's satisfaction in the things which
it enables thee to do according to right reason, and
in the condition that is assigned to thee without thy
own choice ; if, I say, thou seest anything better than
this, turn to it with all thy soul, and enjoy that which
thou hast found to be the best. But .... if thou
findest everything else smaller and of less value than
this, give place to nothing else .... Simply and
freely choose the better, and hold to it." (iii. 6.)

" Body, soul, intelligence : to the body belong sen-
sations, to the soul appetites, to the intelligence prin-
ciples." To be impressed by the senses is peculiar to
animals ; to be pulled by the strings of desire belongs
to effeminate men, and to men like Phalaris or Nero ;
to be guided only by intelligence belongs to atheists
and traitors, and " men who do their impure deeds
when they -have shut the doors. . . . There remains
that which is peculiar to the good man, to be pleased
and content with tvJiat happens^ and with the thread
zvhich is spun for him ; and not to defile the divinity
which is planted in his breast, nor disturb it by a
crowd of images ; but to preserve it tranquil, following
it obediently as a god, neither saying anything con-
trary to truth, nor doing anything contrary to justice."
(iii. i6.)

" Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the
country, sca-shorcs, and mountains, and thou too art
wont to desire such things very much. But this is
altogether a mark of the commonest sort of men, for

3 14 MARCUS A URELIUS

it is in thy power whenever thou shalt chose to retire
into thyself. For nozuhei^e either with more quiet or
with more freedom does a man retire than into Ids
own soul, particularly when he has within him such
thoughts that by looking into them he is immediately
in perfect tranquillity, — which is nothing else than the
good ordering "of the mind." (iv. 3.)

" Unhappy am I, because this has happened to me ?
Not so, but happy am I though this has happened to
me, because I continue free from pain ; neither crushed
by the present, nor fearing the future." (iv. 19.)

It is just possible that in some of these passages
some readers may detect a trace of painful self-con-
sciousness, and imagine th3.t they detect a little grain of
self-complacence. Something of self-consciousness is
perhaps inevitable in the diary and examination of
his own conscience by one who sat on such a lonely
height ; but self-complacency there is none. Nay,
there is sometimes even a cruel sternness^ in the way
in which the Emperor speaks of his own self. He
certainly dealt not with himself in the manner of a
dissembler with God. *' When," he says (x. 8),
" thou hast assumed the names of a man who is good,
modest, rational, magnanimous, cling to those names;
and if thou shouldst lose them, quickly return to
them .... For to continue to be such as thou hast
hitherto been, and to be torn in pieces, and defiled in
such a life, is the character of a very stupid man, and
one over-fond of his life, and like those half-devoured
fighters zvith ivild beasts, who, though covered ivith
wounds and gore, still entreat tj be kept till the folloiv-

HIS *■ MED IT A TIONSy 31 5

ing day, though they will be exposed in the same state
to the same clazvs and bites. Therefore fix th}'sclf in
the possession of these few names : and if thou art
able to abide in them, abide as if thou wert removed
to the Islands of the Blest." Alas ! to Aurelius, in
this life, the Islands of the Blest were very far away.
Heathen philosophy was exalted and eloquent, but
all its votaries were sad ; to " the peace of God, which
passeth all understanding," it was not given them to
attain. We see Marcus *' wise, self-governed, tender,
thankful, blameless," says Mr. Arnold, " yet with
all this agitated, stretching out his arms for some-
thing beyond — tendentemqite maniis 7'ip(2 ulterioris
amore^

I will quote in conclusion but three short pre-
cepts : —

" Be cheerful, and seek not external help, nor the
tranquillity which others give. A man must stand
erect, not be kept erect by others." (iv. 5.)

" Be like the promontory against tvhich the zvaves
continually break, but it stands jirm a7ui tames the fury
of the water arotmd it!' (iv. 49 )

This comparison has been used many a time since
the days of Marcus Aurelius. The reader will at once
recall Goldsmith's famous lines : — -

" As some tall cliff that rears its awful form,

Swells from the vale, and midway leaves the storm.
Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread.
Eternal sunshine settles on its head."

"Short is the little that remains to thee of life

2c2

3i6 MARCUS AURELWS.

Live as on a monntahi. For it makes no difference
whether a man lives there or here, if he Hves every-
where in the world as in a civil community. Let men
see, let them know a real man who lives as he was
meant to live. If they cannot endure him, let them
kill him. For that is better than to live as men do."
(x^ 15.)

Such were some of the thoughts which Marcus
Aurelius wrote in his diary after days of battle with
the Ouadi, and the Marcomanni, and the Sarmat^.
Isolated from others no less by moral grandeur than
by the supremacy of his sovereign rank, he sought the
society of his own noble soul. I sometimes imagine
that I see him seated on the borders of some gloomy
Pannonian forest or Hungarian marsh ; through the
darkness the watchfires of the enemy gleam in the
distance ; but both among them, and in the camp
around him, every sound is hushed, except the tread
of the sentinel outside the imperial tent ; and in that
tent long after midnight sits the patient Emperor by
the light of his solitary lamp, and ever and anon,
amid his lonely musings, he pauses to write down the
pure and holy thoughts which shall better enable him,
even in a Roman palace, even on barbarian battle-
fields, daily to tolerate the meanness and the ma-
lignity of the men around him ; daily to amend his
own shortcomings, and, as the sun of earthly life
begins to set, daily to draw nearer and nearer to the
Eternal Light. And when I thus think of him, I
know not whether the whole of heathen antiquity,
out of its gallery of stately and royal figures, can

HIS " MED IT A TIONSy 5 1 7

furnish a nobler, or purer, or more lovable picture
than that of this crowned philosopher and laurelled
hero, who was yet one of the humblest and one of
the most enlightened of all ancient " Seekers after
God"

CONCLUSION.

A SCEPTICAL writer has observed, with something
like a sneer, that the noblest utterances of Gospel
morality may be paralleled from the writings of
heathen philosophers. The sneer is pointless, and
Christian moralists have spontaneously drawn atten-
tion to the fact. In this volume, so far from trying to
conceal that it is so, I have taken pleasure in placing
side by side the words of Apostles and of Philo-
sophers. The divine origin of Christianity does not
rest on its morality alone. By the aid of the light
which was within them, by deciphering the law written
on their own consciences, however much its letters
may have been obliterated or dimmed, Plato, and
Cicero, and Seneca, and Epictetus, and Aurelius were
enabled to grasp and to enunciate a multitude of
great and memorable truths ; yet they themselves
would have been the first to admit the wavering
uncertainty of their hopes and speculations, and the
absolute necessity of a further illumination. So
strong did that necessity appear to some of the wisest
among them, that Socrates ventures in express words
to prophesy the future advent of some heaven-sent

CONCLUSION. 319

Guide.* Those who imagine that zvithout a written
revelation it would have been possible to learn all
that is necessary for man's well-being, are speaking in
direct contradiction of the greatest heathen teachers,
in contradiction even of those very teachers to whose
writings they point as the proof of their assertion.
Augustine was expressing a very deep conviction
when he said that in Plato and in Cicero he met with
many utterances which were beautiful and wise, but
among them all he never found, " Come unto me, all
ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will refresh
you." Glorious as was the wisdom of ancient thought,
its knowledge respecting the indwelling of the Spirit,
the resurrection of the body, and the forgiveness of
sins, was but fragmentary and vague. Bishop Butler
has justly remarked that " The great doctrines of a
future state, the dangers of a course of wickedness,
and the efficacy of repentance are not only confirmed
in the Gospel, but are taught, especially the last is,
with a degree of light to which that of nature is
darkness."

The morality of Paganism was, on its own con-
fession, insufficient. It was tentative, where Christi-
anity is authoritative : it was dim and partial, where
Christianity is bright and complete ; it was inadequate
to rouse the sluggish carelessness of mankind, where
Christianity came with an imperial and awakening
power ; it gives only a rule, where Christianity sup-
plies a principle. And even where its teachings were
absolutely coincident with those of Scripture, it failed
• Xen. Mem. i, iv. 14 ; Tlato, Alcib. U.

320 CONCLUSION.

to ratify them with a sufficient sanction ; it failed to
announce them with the same powerful and contagious
ardour; it failed to furnish an absolutely faultless and
vivid example of their practice ; it failed to inspire
them with an irresistible motive ; it failed to support
them with a powerful comfort under the difficulties
which were sure to be encountered in the aim after a
consistent and holy life.

1 he attempts of the Christian Fathers to show that
the truths of ancient philosophy were borrowed from
Scripture are due in some cases to ignorance and in
some to a want of perfect honesty in controversial
dealing. That Gideon (Jerubbaal) is identical with the
priest Hierombalos who supplied information to San-
choniathon the Berytian; that Thales pieced together
a philosophy from fragments of Jewish truth learned
in Phoenicia ; that Pythagoras and Democritus availed
themselves of Hebraic traditions, collected during
their travels ; that Plato is a mere " Atticising Moses ;"
that Aristotle picked up his ethical system from a Jew
whom he met in Asia ; and that Seneca corresponded
with St. Paul : are assertions every bit as unhistorical
and false as that Homer was thinking of Genesis when
he described the shield of Achilles, or (as Clemens
of Alexandria gravely informs us) that Miltiades won
the battle of Marathon by copying the strategy of
the battle of Beth-Horon ! To say that Pagan
morality " kindled its faded taper at the Gospel light,
whether furtively or unconsciously taken," and that it
" dissembled the obligation, and made a boast of the
splendour as though it were originally her own, or

CONCLUSION. -Kix

were sufficient in her hands for the moral illuminaHon
of the world," is to make an assertion wholly un-
tenable.* Seneca, Epictetus, Aurelius, are among the
truest and loftiest of Pagan moralists, yet Seneca
ignored the Christians, Epictetus despised, and Au-
relius persecuted them. All three, so far as they
knew anything about the Christians at all, had un-
happily been taught to look upon thsm as the most
degraded and the most detestable sect of what they
had long regarded as the most degraded and the most
detestable of religions.

There is something very touching in this fact ; but,
if there be something very touching, there is also
something very encouraging. God was their God as
well as ours — their Creator, their Preserver, who left
not Himself without witness among them; who, as
they blindly felt after Him, suffered their groping
hands to grasp the hem of His robe; who sent them
rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling their
hearts with joy and gladness. And His Spirit was
with them, dwelling in them, though unseen and un-
known, purifying and sanctifying the temple of their
hearts, sending gleams of illuminating light through
the gross darkness which encompassed them, comfort-
ing their uncertainties, making intercession for them
with groanings which cannot be uttered. And, more
than all, our Saviour was tJicir Saviour too ; He whom

* See for various statements in this passage, Josephus, c. Apion. ii.
§36; Cic. De Fin. v. 25; Clem. Alex. Strom, i, xxii. 150, xxv.
V. 14 ; Euscb. Pnef. Evang. x. 4, ix. 5, &c. ; Lactant. Inst. Div. iv
2, 6cC.

522 CONCLUSION.

they regarded as a crucified malefactor was their true
invisible King; through His righteousness their poor
merits were accepted, their inward sickensses were
healed ; He whose Avorship they denounced as an
** execrable superstition " stood supplicating for them
at the right hand of the Majesiy on high, helping
them (though they knew Him not) to crush all that
was evil within them, and pleading for them when
they persecuted even the most beloved of His saints,
" Father, forgive them ; for they know not what
they do."

Yes, they too were all His offspring. Even if they
had not been, should we grudge that some of the
children's meat should be given unto dogs ? Shall we
deny to these " unconscious prophecies of heathen-
dom " their oracular significance 1 Shall we be jealous
of the ethical loftiness of a Plato or an Aurelius ?
Shall we be loth to admit that some power of the
Spirit of Christ, even mid the dark wanderings of
Seneca's life, kept him still conscious of a nobler and
a better way, or that some sweetness of a divine hope
inspired the depressions of Epictetus in his slavery ?
Shall our eye be evil because God in His goodness
granted the heathen also to know such truths as
enabled them " to overcome the allurements of
the visible and the terrors of the invisible world } "
V^es, if we have of the Christian Church so mean a
conception that we look upon it as a mere human
society, " set up in the world to defend a certain
religion against a certain other religion." But if on
the other hand we believe " that it was a society

CONCLUSION. 323

established by God as a ivitncss for the true coalition
of all human beijigs, we shall rejoice to acknowledge
its members to be what they believed themselves
to be, — confessors and martyrs for a truth which
they could not fully embrace or comprehend, but
which, through their lives and deaths, through the
right and wrong acts, the true and false words, of
those who understand them least, was to manifest
and prove itself Those who hold this conviction
dare not conceal, or misrepresent, or undervalue, any
one of those weighty and memorable sentences which
are to be found in the Meditations of Marcus Au-
relius. If they did, they woidd be underrating a portion
of that very truth which the preacJiers of the Gospel
were appointed to set forth ; they would be adopting
the error of the philosophical Emperor without his
excuse for it. Nor dare they pretend that the Chris-
tian teaching had unconsciously imparted to him a
portion of its own light while he seemed to exclude
it. They will believe that it was God's good pleasure
that a certain truth should be seized and apprehended
by this age, and they will see indications of what that
truth was in the efforts of Plutarch to understand the
* Daemon ' which guided Socrates, in the courageous
language of Ignatius, in the bewildering dreams of the
Gnostics, in the eagerness of Justin Martyr to prove
Christianity a philosophy ... in tlie apprehension of
Christian principles by Marcus Aurelius, and in his
hatred of the Christians. From every side they will
derive evidence, tJuit a doctrine and society which were
meant for nianki)id cannot depend upon the partial views

00 2 L)

324 CONCLUSION.

and appi^eheitsions of men^ but must go on justifying^
reconciling^ confuting, those views and apprehensions by
the demonstration of facts T*

But perhaps some reader will say, What advantage,
then, can we gain by studying in Pagan writers truths
which are expressed more nobly, more clearly, and
infinitely more effectually in our own sacred books ?
Before answering the question, let me mention the
traditional anecdote]" of the Caliph Omar. When he
conquered Alexandria, he was shown its magnificent
library, in which were collected untold treasures of
literature, gathered together by the zeal, the labour,
and the liberality of a dynasty of kings. " What is
the good of all those books?" he said. ''They are
either in accordance with the Koran, or contrary to
it. If the former they are superfluous ; if the latter
they are pernicious. In either case let them be
burnt." Burnt they were, as legend tells ; but all the
world has condemned the Caliph's reasoning as a
piece of stupid Philistinism and barbarous bigotry.
Perhaps the question as to the iLse of reading Pagan
ethics is equally unphilosophical ; at any rate, we can
spare but very few words to its consideration. The
answer obviously is, that God has spoken to men,
TToXufjuepoy^ koI irokyTpoiTM^, " at sundry times and in
divers manners,":]: with a richly variegated wisdom. §

* Maurice, Phllos. of the First Six Centuries, p. 37. We venture
specially to recommend this weighty and beautiful passage to Ibe
reader's serious attention.

t Now known to be unhistorical.

X Heb. i. I.

§ TToAuirotKjAos «ro(^Ia.

CONCLUSION. 325

Sometimes He has tauorht truth by the voice of
Hebrew prophets, sometimes by the voice of Pagan
philosophers. And all His voices demand our listen-
ing ear. If it was given to the Jew to speak with
diviner insight and intenser power, it was given to
the Gentile also to speak at times with a large and
lofty utterance, and we may learn truth from men of
alien lips and another tongue. They too had the
dream, the vision, the dark saying upon the harp, the
" daughter of a voice," the mystic flashes upon the
graven gems. And such truths come to us with a
singular force and freshness ; with a strange beauty
as the doctrines of a less brightly illuminated man-
hood ; with a new power of conviction from their
originality of form, w4iich, because it is less familiar
to us, is well calculated to arrest our attention after
it has been paralysed by familiar repetitions. We
cannot afford to lose these heathen testimonies to
Christian truth ; or to hush the glorious utterances of
Muse and Sibyl which have justly outlived " the
drums and tramplings of a hundred triumphs."
We may make them infinitely profitable to us. If
St. Paul quotes Aratus, and Menander, and Epime-
nides,* and perhaps more than one lyrical melody
besides, with earnest appreciation, — if the inspired
Apostle could both learn himself and teach others
out of the utterances of a Cretan ])hilosopher and
an Attic comedian, — we may be sure that many of
Seneca's apophthegms would have filled hi'n with
pleasure, and that he would have been abl? to read

* See Acts xvii. 28; i Cor.; Tit. 1. 12.

326 CONCLUSION.

Fpictetus and Aurelius with the same noble admira-
tion which made him see with thankful emotion that
memorable altar TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.

Let us then make a brief and final sketch of the
three great Stoics whose lives we have been con-
templating, with a view to summing up their speciali-
ties, their deficiencies, and the peculiar relations to,
or divergences from, Christian truth, which their
writings present to us.

" Seneca saepe noster," " Seneca, often our own," is
the expression of Tertullian, and he uses it as an
excuse for frequent references to his works. Yet if, of
the three, he be most like Christianity in particular
passages, he diverges most widely from it in his general
spirit.

He diverges from Christianity in many of his modes
of regarding life, and in many of his most important
beliefs. What, for instance, is his main conception of
the Deity } Seneca is generally a Pantheist. No
doubt he speaks of God's love and goodness, but with
him God is no personal living Father, but the soul of
the universe — the fiery, primaeval, eternal principle
which transfuses an inert, and no less eternal, matter,
and of which our souls are, as it were, but divine
particles or passing sparks. " God," he says, ** is
Nature, is Fate, is Fortune, is the Universe, is the all-
pervading Mind. He cannot change the substance oi
ihe universe, He is Himself under the power of
Destiny, which is uncontrollable and immutable. It
is not God who rolls the thunder, it is Fate. He does
*not rejoice in His works, but is identical with them."

CONCl^aSlON. ' 527

In fact, Seneca would have heartily adopted the words
of Pope : —

" All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body nature is, and God the soul."

Though there may be a vague sense in which those
words may be admitted and explained by Christians,
yet, in the mind of Seneca, they led to conclusions
directly opposed to those of Christianity. With him,
for instance, the wise man is the equal of God ; not
His adorer, not His servant, not His suppliant, but
His associate, His relation. He differs from God in
time alone. Hence all prayer is needless, he says, and
the forms of external worship are superfluous and
puerile. It is foolish to beg for that which you can
impart to yourself. " What need is there of vows ?
'^i^ke yourself happy." Nay, in the intolerable arro-
gance which marked the worst aberration of Stoicism,
the wise man is under certain aspects placed even
higher than God— higher than God Himself — because
God is beyond the reach of misfortunes, but the wise
man is superior to their anguish ; and because God is
good of necessity, but the wise man from choice. This
wretched and inflated paradox occurs in Seneca's
treatise 07t Providence^ and in the same treatise he
glorifies suicide, and expresses a doubt as to the
immortality of the soul.

Again, the two principles on which Seneca relied as

the basis of all his moral system are : first, the principle

that we ought to follow Nature ; and, secondly, the

supposed perfectibility of the ideal man.

I. Now, of course, if wc explain this precept of

2d2

328 CONCLUSION.

" following Nature " as Juvenal has explained it, and
say that the voice of Nature is always coincident with
the voice of philosophy — if we prove that our real
nature is none other than the dictate of our highest and
most nobly trained reason, and if we can establish the
fact that every deed of cruelty, of shame, of lust, or of
selfishness, is essentially contrary to our nature — then
we may say with Bishop Butler, that the precept " to
follow Nature " is " a manner of speaking not loose
and undeterminate, but clear and distinct, strictly
just and true." But how complete must be the
system, how long the preliminary training, which alone
can enable us to find any practical value, any appre-
ciable aid to a virtuous life, in a dogma such as this !
And, in the hands of Seneca, it becomes a very empty
formula. He entirely lacked the keen insight and
dialectic subtlety of such a writer as Bishop Butler ;
and, in his explanation of this Stoical shibboleth,
any real meaning which it may possess is evaporated
into a gorgeous mist of confused declamation and
splendid commonplace.

2. Nor is he much more fortunate with his ideal
man. This pompous abstraction presents us with a
conception at once ambitious and sterile. The Stoic
wise man is a sort of moral Phoenix, impossible and
repulsive. He is intrepid in dangers, free from all
passion, happy in adversity, calm in the storm ; he
alone knows how to live, because he alone knows how
to die ; he is the master of the world, because he is
master of himself, and the equal of God ; he looks
down upon everything with sub]iiitt£ imperturbability.

CONCLUSIOPi. 329

despising the sadnessess of humanity and smiHnorwith
irritating loftiness at all our hopes and all our fears.
But, in another sketch of this faultless and un-
pleasant monster, Seneca presents us, not the proud
athlete who challenges the universe and is invulner-
able to all the stings and arrows of passion or of
fate, but a hero in the serenity of absolute triumiph,
more tender indeed, but still without desires, without
passions, without needs, who can feel no pity because
pity is a weakness which disturbs his sapient calm !
Well might the eloquent Bossuet exclaim, as he read
of these chimerical perfections, " It is to take a tone
too lofty for feeble and mortal men. But, O maxims
truly pompous ! O affected insensibility ! O false and
imaginary wisdom, which fancies itself strong because
it is hard, and generous because it is puffed up I
How are these principles opposed to the modest
simplicity of the Saviour of souls, who, in our Gospel,
contemplating His faithful ones in affliction, confesses
that they will be saddened by it ! ' Ye sJiall weep and
lament!'' Shall Christians be jealous of such wisdom
as Stoicism did really attain, when they compare this
dry and bloodless ideal with Him who wept over
Jerusalem and mourned by the grave of Lazarus, who
had a mother and a friend, who disdained none, who
pitied all, who humbled Himself to death, even the
death of the cross, whose divine excellence we cannot
indeed attain because He is God, but whose example
we can imitate because He was very Man ?*

* Sf i Martha, Lcs Moralisles, p. 50; Aubertin, Shi^que d St. Path
p. 250.

,3o CONCLUSION.

The one grand aim of the life and philosophy of
Seneca was Ease. It is the topic which constantly
recurs in his books On a Happy Life, On Tranquillity
of Mind, On Anger, and On the Ease and On the Firm-
ness of the Sage. It is the pitiless apathy, the stern
repression of every form of emotion, which was con-
stantly glorified as the aim of philosophy. It made
Stilpo exclaim, when he had lost wife, property, and
children, that he had lost nothing, because he carried
in his own person everything which he possessed. It
led Seneca into all that is most unnatural, all that is
most fantastic, and all that is least sincere in his
writings ; it was the bitter source of disgrace and
failure in his life. It comes out worst of all in his
book On Anger. Aristotle had said that "Anger
was a good servant but a bad master ; " Plato had
recognised the immense value and importance of the
irascible element in the moral constitution. Even
Christian writers, in spite of Bishop Butler, have
often lost sight of this truth, and have forgotten
that to a noble nature " the hate of hate " and the
" scorn of scorn " are as indispensable as " the love
of love." But Seneca almost gets angry himself at
the very notion of the wise man being angry and
indignant even against moral evil. No, he must
not get angry, because it would disturb his subhme
calm ; and, if he allowed himself to be angry at
wrong-doing, he would have to be angry all day long.
This practical Epicureanism, this idle acquiescence in
the supposed incurability of evil, poisoned all Seneca's
career. " He had tutored himself," says Professor

CONCLUSION. 33'

Maurice, " to endure personal injuries without in-
dulging in anger ; he had tutored himself to look
upon all moral evil without anger. If the doctrine is
sound and the discipline desirable, we must be con-
tent to take the whole result of them. If we will
not do that, we must resolve to hate oppression and
wrong, evm at the cost of philosophical coinpostire"
But repose is not to be our aim : —

" We have no right to bliss,
No title from the gods to welfare and repose."

It is one of the truths which seems to me most
needed in the modern religious world, that the type
of a Christian's virtue must be very miserable, and
ordinary, and ineffectual, if he does not feel his whole
soul burn within him with an almost implacable
moral indignation at the sight of cruelty and in-
justice, of Pharisaic faithlessness and social crimes.

I have thus freely criticised the radical defects of
Stoicism, so far as Seneca is its legitimate exponent ;
but I cannot consent to leave him with the language
of depreciation, and therefore here I will once more
endorse what an anonymous writer has said of him :
" An unconscious Christianity covers all his senti-
ments. If the fair fame of the man is sullied, the
aspiration to a higher life cannot be denied to the
philosopher; if the tinkling cymbal of a stilted
Stoicism sometimes sounds through the nobler music,
it still leaves the truer melody vibrating on the ear."

2. If Seneca sought for EASE, the grand aim of
Epictetus was Free[)OM, of Marcus Aurelius was

332 CONCLUSION.

Self-government. This difference of aim charac-
terises their entire philosophy, though all three of
them are filled with precepts which arise from the
Stoical contempt of opinion, of fortune, and of death.
** Epictetus, the slave, with imperturbable calm, volun-
tarily strikes off the desire for all those blessings of
which fortune had already deprived him. Seneca,
who lived in the Court, fenced himself beforehand
against misfortune with the spirit of a man of the
world and the emphasis of a master of eloquence.
Marcus Aurelius, at the zenith of human power —
having nothing to dread except his passions, and
finding nothing above him except immutable necessity,
— surveys his own soul and meditates especially on
the eternal march of things. The one is the resigned
slave, who neither desires nor fears ; the other, the
great lord, who has everything to lose ; the third,
finally, the emperor, who is dependent only on him-
self and upon God."

Of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius we shall have
very little to say by way of summary, for they show
no inconsistencies and very few of the imperfections
which characterise Seneca's ideal of the Stoic philo-
sophy. The " moral peddling," the pedagogic display,
the puerile ostentation, the antithetic brilliancy, which
we have had to point out in Seneca, are wanting
in them. The picture of the mner life, indeed, of
Seneca, his efforts after self-discipline, his untiring
asceticism, his enthusiasm for all that he esteems holy
and of good report — this picture, marred as it is by
rhetoric and vain self-conceit, yet " stands out in noble

CONCLUSION. 333

contrast to the swinishness of the Campanian villas,
and is, in its complex entirety, very sad and affecting."
And yet we must admit, in the words of the same
writer, that when we go from Seneca to Epictetus and
Marcus Aurelius, "it is going from the florid to the
severe, from varied feeling to the impersonal sim-
plicity of the teacher, often from idle rhetoric to
devout earnestness." As far as it goes, the morality
of these two great Stoics is entirely noble and entirely
beautiful. If there be even in Epictetus some passing
and occasional touch of Stoic arrogance and Stoic
apathy ; if there be in Marcus Aurelius a depth and
intensity of sadness which shows how comparatively
powerless for comfort was a philosophy which glorified
suicide, which knew but little of immortality, and
which lost in vague Pantheism the unspeakable bless-
ing of realizing a personal relation to a personal God
and Father — there is yet in both of them enough and
more than enough to show that in all ages and in all
countries they who have sought for God have found
Him, that they have attained to high principles of
thought and to high standards of action — that they
have been enabled, even in the thick darkness, reso-
lutely to place their feet at least on the lowest rounds
of that ladder of sunbeams which winds up through
the darkness to the great Father of Lights.

And yet the very existence of such men is in itself
a significant comment upon the Scriptural decision
that " the world by wisdom knew not God." For
how many like them, out of all the records of
antiquity, is it possible for us to count ? iVre there

334 CONCLUSION.

five men in the whole circle of ancient history and
ancient Hterature to whom we could, without a
sense of incongruity, accord the title of ''holy?"
When we have mentioned Socrates, Epictetus, and
Marcus Aurelius, I hardly know of another. Just men
there were in multitudes — men capable of high actions ;
men eminently worthy to be loved ; men, I doubt
not, who, when the children of the kingdom shall be
rejected, shall be gathered from the east and the west
with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, into the kingdom of
heaven. Yts, just men in multitudes ; but how many
righteous^ how many holy ? Some, doubtless, whom
we do not know, whose names were never written, even
for a few years, on the records of mankind — men and
women in unknown villages and humble homes, " the
faithful who were not famous." We do not doubt that
there were such — but were they relatively numerous ?
If those who rose above the level of the multitude —
if those whom some form of excellence, and often of
virtue, elevated into the reverence of their fellows —
present to us so few examples of stainless life, can we
hope that a tolerable ideal of sanctity was attained by
any large proportion of the ordinary myriads .-* Seeing
that the dangerous lot of the majority was cast amid
the weltering sea of popular depravity, can we ven-
ture to hope that many of them succeeded in reaching
some green island of purity, integrity, and calm } We
can hardly think it ; and yet, in the dispensation of
the Kingdom of Heaven we see such a condition daily
realized. Not only do we see many of the eminent, but
also countless multitudes of the lowly and obscure,

CONCLUSION. 335

whose common lives are, as it were, transfigured with
a light from heaven. Unhappy, indeed, is he who has
not known such men in person, and whose hopes and
habits have not caught some touch of radiance reflected
from the nobility and virtue of lives like these. The
thought has been well expressed by the author of Ecce
Homo, and we may well ask with him, " If this be so,
has Christ failed, or can Christianity die 'i "

No, it has not failed ; it cannot die ; — for the saving
knowledge which it has imparted is the most inesti-
mable blessing which God has granted to our race.
We have watched philosophy in its loftiest flight, but
that flight rose as far above the range of the Pagan
populace as Ida or Olympus rises above the plain :
and even the topmost crests of Ida and Olympus are
immeasurably below the blue vault, the body of
heaven in its clearness, to which it has been granted
to some Christians to attain. As regards the multi-
tude, philosophy had no influence over the heart
and character ; " it was sectarian, not universal ; the
religion of the few, not of the many. It exercised
no creative power over political or social life; it
stood in no such relation to the past as the New
Testament to the Old. Its best thoughts were but
views and aspects of the truth ; there was no centre
around which they moved, no divine life by which
they were impelled ; they seemed to vanish and flit
in uncertain succession of light." But Christianity,
on the other hand, glowed with a steady and un-
wavering brightness ; it not only swayed the hearts of
individuals by stirring them tc their utmost depths,

2 k

336 CONCLUSION.

but it moulded the laws of nations, and regenerated
the whole condition of society. It gave to mankind a
fresh sanction in the word of Christ, a perfect example
in His life, a powerful motive in His love, an all
sufficient comfort in the life of immortality made sure
and certain to us by His Resurrection and Ascension.
But if without this sanction, and example, and
motive, and comfort the pagans could learn to do
His will, — if, amid the gross darkness through which
glitters the degraded civilization of imperial Rome, an
Epictetus and an Aurelius could live blameless lives
in a cell and on a throne, and a Seneca could practise
simplicity and self-denial in the midst of luxury and
pride — how much loftier should be both the zeal and
the attainments of us to whom God has spoken by His
Son ? What manner of men ought we to be ? If Tyre
and Sidon and Sodom shall rise in the judgment to
bear witness against Chorazin and Bethsaida, may
not the pure lives of these great Seekers after God add
a certain emphasis of condemnation to the vice, the
pettiness, the mammon-worship of many among us to
whom His love. His nature. His attributes have been
revealed with a clearness and fulness of knowledge for
which kings and philosophers have sought indeed
and sought earnestly, but sought in vain ?

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