Annus, the most prominent and interesting man of his time, was the second son of Seneca the rhetorician. He was born at Cordova, B.C. 3 (about the same time as the Apostle St Paul), and brought to Rome by his family when an infant in arms. From the first he was of a feeble constitution. His life, like that of Pope, was "a long disease;" and he was liable from infancy to nervous shivers, asthma, fever, and fainting. But in a delicate and languid body lived a daring and restless soul, to which, perhaps, his Spanish descent had given a touch of "phantasy and flame." The intense and characteristic ardour of his studies tended still more to undermine his health. Although his father mainly urged him to the pursuits of rhetoric, philosophy attracted him with superior charms; and he gladly turned from the dull platitudes of artificial eloquence to the spiritual guidance of Demetrius the Cynic, and Sotion the Pythagorean. He found a sublime pleasure in carrying their precepts into daily practice; like Attalus, he learned to lie on a hard mattress, and like Sextus he became a vegetarian in diet and subjected himself to daily self-examination. The worthy rhetorician, his father, regarded these vagaries of philosophic asceticism with strong intellectual dislike; but he persuaded Seneca to abandon them, rather on the ground that they laid him open to the suspicion of adopting those oriental superstitions the proselytes of which had recently been banished from Rome by an edict of Tiberius. Seneca, however, never quite forgot the Stoic precepts of temperance and sobriety. In the bosom of opulence he remained an enemy of the Ionian luxuries of baths and perfumes; he slept lightly, and drank but little wine; and whatever may have been the value or splendour of his 500 cedar and ivory-footed tables, they were rarely spread with any entertainment more sumptuous than water, vegetables, and fruit.
Turned by filial respect into less congenial pursuits, he threw his whole mind into public and forensic duties. He was elected quaestor, and soon won a brilliant reputation at the bar. His fame and ability excited the jealousy of the Emperor Caligula, who himself pretended to eloquence, and had a deadly hatred of superior genius. Domitius Afer had already saved himself from the tyrant's spiteful fury, by an acknowledgment of inferiority. Seneca only owed his life to his ill health; for Caligula was assured by one of his mistresses that so sickly a subject could not last long. The emperor accordingly contented himself with contemptuous descriptions of Seneca's style, which he called "sand without lime."
Forced by this danger to change his plans, Seneca once more began to devote himself to philosophy, and mastered with great assiduity the voluminous treatises of Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Chrysippus, and Epicurus. This was probably the period of his greatest intellectual activity, because he was living in the closest intercourse with all the literary men of the day, undisturbed by any public or professional duties. If he ever travelled in Egypt, where his uncle had been prefect for sixteen years, it must have been about this time. But the journey is very doubtful; and the fact that he travelled at all, although eagerly believed by those who wish to attribute some of his knowledge to Jewish or Christian information, is a mere precarious inference from the title of a lost treatise on India.
Upon the death of Caligula, Seneca was free to resume his political ambition, but a sudden check was put to his splendid career. He was accused of adulterous intercourse with Julia, the beautiful and infamous sister of the late emperor, whom Claudius had recalled from her banishment in the island of Poetia. The charge was brought by Messalina, who both hated and feared her haughty kinswoman; but the guilt of the accuser is not sufficient to exonerate Seneca from participation in the crime. Because Messalina was a licentious and cruel woman, it does not follow that Seneca was an innocent man; and it seems to us unlikely that he should have been fixed upon for punishment, without some adequate grounds of suspicion. Considering the weakness, the deplorable weakness, of Seneca's character, the laxity of the age in such matters, and the certainty that this and similar charges clung to him through life, there is reason to fear his guilt. We do not think that this would have deterred such a woman as Agrippina from subsequently making him the tutor of Nero. Even in the nineteenth century, and in Christian countries, we do not find men precluded from filling the most exalted and responsible stations from the notoriety of their immoral lives.
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1 Sen. Prof. in Controv., lib. i. 2 Acts xviii. 12. 3 Sen. Ep. civill, "Philosophiam Oderat." 4 Niebuhr's Rome, iii. 192, ed. Schmitz. 5 Consol. ad Helv. xvi. 6 Ep. cvilli, cix.; Aubertin's Sénèque et St Paul, p. 165. 7 Ad Helv. xvii.; Ep. liv. 78. 8 Suet. Calig. iii. 9 Dion. lxiv. 19. 10 Plin. H. N. vii. 17. 11 Tac. xiii. 41; Dio. lx. 10. Seneca appears to have mitigated the original severity of the sentence passed by the senate, and Seneca was banished to the island of Corsica, without any confiscation of his property (n.e. 41). Barbarous, and savage, and terrible as the rocks of Corsica appeared to the exile, this eight years' banishment was to him an unmixed blessing; and was the period of his life on which we can dwell with the most pleasure. It mollified the virulence of the envions, and excited the compassion of the good; it increased his real reputation, while it diminished his obvious dangers. Above all, it gave him a season of calm and safety for the growth and nurture of his character and genius. In the intoxication of prosperity and power, he never forgot the sobering lessons of humiliation and misfortune; and perhaps, while the seas and stars and winds were supplying food for his philosophic contemplation, he was nearer happiness than while he was the prey of anxiety and suspicion in the midst of gardens and villas that an emperor might have envied.
Two works, which resulted from his residence at Corsica, are extremely curious illustrations of his wavering impulses, the Consolatio ad Helvetiam and the Consolatio ad Polybius. The former was written to comfort his mother with the thought that he was raised by the study of philosophy above the need of pity. He eloquently praises the glories of nature, and the delicious reveries of intellectual solitude; and some, at least, of his arguments bear the impress of sincerity. Yet, in the Consolatio ad Polybius, he implores an unprincipled freedman to procure his acquittal even at the cost of his character, and he endeavours to gain the repeal of his sentence by the grossest adulation to the "divine and merciful" emperor. The admirers of Seneca have always wished to prove this work spurious; but it is merely another example of a fact which is sufficiently obvious to any impartial judge, that Seneca was a philosopher in name alone. Let us remember, too, that such language, however little it could have been used by a Thrasea or an Helvidius, was all but universal in that enslaved, degraded age. It meant a great deal less than it seems to mean; and such epithets conveyed quite as little impression of flattery to a Roman ear as our own terms "religious and gracious," when applied to a Charles II. or a George IV.
We now come to the third stage of Seneca's eventful life. Messalina being dead, her successor Agrippina determined, by a stroke of policy, at once to gain a first-rate adviser and to secure popular applause, by persuading the easy emperor to recall the philosopher, elevate him to the pretorship, and make him the tutor of the young Nero (A.D. 49). Seneca was not superior to the splendid temptation of such a proposal, though, even with his marvellous reputation, he could hardly have hoped for much legitimate influence in such a court, composed as it was of an uxorious dotard, insolent freedmen, and licentious women. He may have had an honest desire to serve his generation, or he may have been unable to decline the proffer; but at any rate he must have been aware, that in undertaking the duties of the position, he was entering a region perilous alike to his rectitude and his peace.
From this time the biography of Seneca must assume the form of an apology rather than of a panegyric. The philosopher is merged in the courtier, and we see the Stoic transformed in his public life into a minister both supple and complaisant. The "comitas honesta" which Tacitus attributes to him can only be an euphemism for unworthy subservience. It was, perhaps, impossible for him to instil anything noble into the weak and degraded mind of Nero; but Seneca must certainly incur the blame of signal failure in the management of his pupil. A loose and ignorant youth, initiated from infancy into all the mysteries of iniquity, the son of vile parents, and the heir to boundless expectations, was not likely to become either wise or good. But if Seneca had guided him with a firmer will and a stronger hand, might he not have been saved from developing into a monster? If Nero had seen in his tutor a man of high aims and stainless integrity, is it possible that he could ever have formed a cherished belief that all men, however successful their hypocrisy, were at heart as degraded and as infamous as himself? The treatise which Seneca addresses to him on clemency, and the appeal, in which he reminds his pupil of past expostulations, are indeed proofs that the philosopher could give admirable advice in a graceful and dignified manner; but advice alone, even when accompanied by good example, would have been as ineffective with Nero as it was with the sons of Eli; and, unhappily, it will be seen that Seneca, while yielding to the pleas of expediency, belied the precepts of his philosophy in the weakness of his life.
No sooner was Claudius poisoned than Seneca wrote the flowery official oration in which Nero pronounced his funeral eulogium, and a satire against his foibles, overflowing with the deadliest contempt. It is possible that the oration, which was received with laughter, was merely an audacious piece of irony. The satire has come down to us, and displays the "divine and merciful" emperor in all his wretchedness. The very name by which it was commonly known conveys the bitterest sarcasm; it involves a comparison between Claudius and one of "those bloated guards which sun their speckled bellies before the doors of the Roman peasants." His deification, according to Seneca, should have been called guardification. "The senate decreed its divinity; Seneca translated it into pumpkinitude." This fragment of antiquity is very curious and interesting; it begins with spattering mud on the despised memory of the divine Claudius; it ends with a shower of poetic roses over the glory of the diviner Nero!
It was a terrible court for a Stoic to live in. Seneca and his somewhat stolid, but far more virtuous, colleague, the soldier Burrus, had to combine their courteous wisdom and military bluntness, in order to check at once the insolent ambition of Agrippina and the mad passions of her son. Whatever may have been Seneca's public obligations to Agrippina, or his private intrigues with her, he sided unhesitatingly with Nero. At first the new government gave an illusory hope of justice and clemency. Nero delivered many harangues full of promise, which it was well known that Seneca had written, either, says Tacitus, "to prove that his counsels were beneficial, or to show off his intellectual power." We might have hoped that Seneca had a nobler object in view, but it is sad to find that Tacitus gives no hint of it; and we cannot but fear that he had far more accurate means of estimating the character of the philosopher than we can pretend to have. Seneca did, however, succeed for a time in restraining the savage canine nature of his pupil from the taste of human blood. He was less successful in governing Nero's licentiousness, and was forced not only to connive at, but even to encourage the youth's unworthy amour with the freedwoman Acte.
Blacker events followed. Nero murdered his young and innocent brother, Britannicus, and Seneca was more than suspected of having had his share of the largesses by which the murderer sought to remove the odium of the deed. Nor must we forget that the treatise de Clementia, in which he expresses such hysterical admiration of the young em- Seneca's goodness of heart, was written after the commission of this most atrocious crime. Nero next caused the assassination of his mother, and Seneca, even if ignorant of the first attempt upon her life, of which Dion Cassius charges him with being the instigator, was the first to break the hideous silence, in sanction of the expediency which demanded the completion of the murder. Besides this, he was the author of the letter in which Nero at once blackened his mother's memory, and gave an account of her death too ridiculously false to gain a moment's credence. It is awful to think of this patron of virtue sitting down to adorn with his usual graces of style the defence of an incestuous matricide, by imputations which he knew to be groundless and an assertion which he knew to be a lie.
In spite of the dark whispers of the people, and the open charges which had been brought against him by Sallust, Seneca was now at the summit of his fame. His overgrown wealth was the reward of his guilty connivance. Two of his greatest contemporaries, Juvenal and Tacitus, call him "predilect," "the too wealthy." His enemies accused him of increasing this wealth by the basest arts of the legacy-hunter and the parasite; but even if this be false, he certainly did increase it by enormous usury, which "exhausted Italy and the provinces." Dion, who omits no opportunity of aspersing his memory, even accuses him of having caused the war with Britain, by suddenly recalling the enormous sum of 4,000,000 sesterces. The terms in which he himself alludes to his income leave no reason to doubt that it amounted to 300,000,000 sesterces, and his single defence, that he owed it all to Nero's bounty, is very lame and unworthy. His wealth was unquestionably dishonourable to him. "The business of a philosopher," says Lord Macaulay, "was to declaim in praise of poverty with two millions sterling out at usury, to meditate epigrammatic conceits about usury in gardens that 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 that had just before written the defence of the murder of a mother by a son."
His riches hastened his ruin. Burrus died, perhaps by poison, in A.D. 63, and was succeeded by Rufus and Tigellinus, both of whom excited the jealousy and suspicion of Nero against the hated philosopher. Feeling his danger, he demanded an interview with the emperor, and begged leave to resign his vast possessions, and after his fourteen years of service, to retire into private life. Nero declined the offer with treacherous caresses, and the strongest assertions of regard; but Seneca, under the pretence of study and ill health, withdrew from affairs of state, reduced his princely establishment, and avoided publicity by every means in his power.
Not long after, when Nero began to add sacrilege to his other crimes, Seneca once more asked permission to leave Rome, and, on a second refusal, feigned a severe illness, and confined himself to his chamber. It was thought that an attempt of Nero to poison him by the instrumentality of his freedman Cleoniceus, was only defeated by the confession of the accomplices, or by the abstemious habits of the philosopher, who now took only bread and fruit as his food, and quenched his thirst only out of the running stream.
Under circumstances such as these, we should hardly be surprised if he turned conspirator. His popularity and wealth made him not only a tempting prey, but a dangerous and dreaded rival. Even in A.D. 63, he had been suspected of a treasonable correspondence with Piso, and in A.D. 66, he was actually charged with a knowledge of Piso's political intrigues. The evidence brought against him was of the feeblest character, but there was a report to which Juvenal, as well as Tacitus, seems to allude, that Subrius Flavus had, with Seneca's knowledge, entertained a design of murdering Piso, in case of his conspiracy succeeding, and of then offering the imperial power to Seneca himself. The rumour is at least a proof of Seneca's dangerous popularity; and Nero, long disgusted by the tacit reproach of his hated tutor's mere existence, determined, with great alacrity, to get rid of him. After giving a futile hint, the tribune Granius Sylvanus was sent expressly to command his suicide. Seneca was supping with his young wife Paulina in a villa five miles from the city, and not being allowed to see his will, prepared at once to put the order of death into execution, consoling his friends with the too complacent observation, that he would at least leave to them the legacy of a noble example. Checking their tears and lamentations, and reluctantly yielding to his wife's desire to share his death, he caused his own veins and those of Paulina to be opened at one blow. His blood flowed so slowly, in consequence of age and feebleness, that it was afterwards necessary to open the veins of his legs; and his torments were so prolonged and excruciating that he was forced to separate from Paulina, in order to spare her the pain of witnessing them. Paulina's life was saved by the order of Nero, though her white face showed ever after how much she had endured. Meanwhile, Seneca having swallowed in vain a draught of hemlock, was placed in a warm bath, and as he entered it, sprinkled his slaves with the water, saying, that it was a libation to Jupiter the Liberator. Finally, growing impatient of the useless agony, he was carried into a sudatorium, and stifled by the warm vapour. A.D. 65. He was at this time about seventy years of age. His friends afterwards published the eloquent messages which he had delivered to them during his dying moments, and which they had taken down at his own request. His body was privately burned without any ceremony, according to the directions which he had left in his will, written in the days of his prosperity and power.
Lipsius and others have made the character of Seneca a theme for extravagant admiration; but they do so by omitting all those black and ugly particulars which mark the period of his elevation. So admirable is his theoretic morality, that the forged correspondence between him and St Paul was long accepted as genuine, and on the strength of it he has been quoted as an authority by fathers and councils, and almost spoken of as a Christian by Tertullian and St Jerome. Yet, at the best, his life is a melancholy spectacle; it was one long conscious inconsistency; one continual surrender of real duty to fancied expediency. Some of his worst acts may find a parallel in the lives of greater and better men; but his defence of Nero's matricide is many shades more disgraceful than Bacon's apology for the execution of Essex, or Milton's arguments for the murder of Charles I. Even if we judge him, independently of his philosophic pretensions, he presents a somewhat despicable appearance. Niebuhr's judgment of him is quite just. "He was an accomplished man of the world, who occupied 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 philo-
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1 Ixii. 12. 2 Ann. xiv. 12. 3 Quint., Inst. Orat. viii. 5, 18. 4 Ann. xiii. 42. 5 Juv. x. 16. 6 Ixii. 2. 7 Ann. xv. 53; Sen., de Benef. iii. 18. 8 Essay on Lord Bacon. 7 Ann. xiv. 55. 9 Xv. 45. 10 Sat. viii. 212. 11 Dion's account, as usual, has a more malignant colouring (Ixii. 10; lxiii. 25); but in this instance his calumnious propensity is too obvious to entitle him to any regard. 12 See the quotations in Lipsius, Concil. Tauronens. ii. 15; Lactant., Div. Just. i. 4; Aug., de Civ. Dei, vi. 10; Tertull., de Anima. L.; Jerome, de Script. Eccles. c. 12. Sophist; but he acted on the principle that, as far as he himself was concerned, he might dispense with the laws of morality which he laid down for others, and that he might give way to his natural propensities. This judgment may sound harsh, but in point of fact Seneca never professes for a moment to rise in practice to the level of his philosophic aspirations. He was, he tells us, not virtuous, but a lover of virtue; not a philosopher, but a student of philosophy. "I am pre-occupied," he says, "with vices." All I require of myself is, not to be equal to the best, but only to be better than the bad.
As a philosopher, Seneca has no great claims on our attention. He abounds, indeed, in those noble and advanced ethical conclusions whose wide dissemination made them the avant-couriers for the reception of Christianity, and which seem to have resulted from the profound thoughtfulness forced upon the greatest intellects by the desperate condition of the times. But we find in him no approach to a consistent system; he expresses the thoughts of the moment with eloquence and precision, but perhaps in the next treatise we find him contradicting and refuting them. His intellect has an encyclopedic character, and like some modern writers, he united the claims of orator, poet, philosopher, geographer, historian, and naturalist. In all these branches of learning he shows conspicuous cleverness, but does not rise in any of them to first-rate eminence. Caligula was not far wrong in criticising his intellectual efforts as "commissiones meras," isolated and unsubstantiated displays. Seneca had successively experienced the weariness of exile, the luxury of power, and the bitterness of retirement and disgrace; and it is no wonder that his works contain many inconsistencies, because they are strongly marked by the impress of the period of his life at which they were written. For instance, in his book De Constantia Sapientiae, glowing in all the fervour of philosophic intolerance, he eloquently praises the quietism and aridéa of Stiplo; whereas in the De Animi tranquillitate, and in the De Otio Sapientiae, published after his recall from exile, he departs widely from the principles of stoicism, and pronounces with equal enthusiasm in favour of an active life. The treatise, De Vita Beata, composed at a later period of his court career, becomes almost Epicurean in its estimate of worldly advantages, and in some places sounds like a personal apology for those actions of Seneca which were most open to adverse criticisms. In a similar manner we can trace in the wavering and often contradictory conclusions of his other writings the immediate influences by which he was surrounded.
Besides the works which we have mentioned, Seneca wrote excellent little treatises on Providence and on the Shortness of Life; three books on Anger, which, according to Valerius Maximus, was a prevalent vice of the Roman character; a Dissertation on Clemency, addressed to Nero at the commencement of his reign; and seven books on Benefits, in which he takes care to prove that, in spite of the boundless gifts which Nero had heaped upon him, the favours of a tyrant are wanting in all the requisites which invite or necessitate a feeling of gratitude. But his two best works are the Letters to Lucilius and the Natural Questions. In the Letters, written during his old age and retirement, he stores up the mellow maxims of a long and chequered experience; laying aside the pedantry of the philosopher, he gives free and natural expression to the hopes and emotions of the man. Foreseeing the ultimate necessity of suicide, he looks forward to it with calm and steady pleasure, as a happy release from the insolence of power and the plots of crime. The seven books of Naturales Questiones were commenced during his exile, but finished and revised in his later years. They contain many fine passages and curious conjectures. But Seneca studies physical science only for the sake of its moral applications. If he speaks of the composition of mirrors, he takes occasion to denounce the abuse of them for the purposes of vanity and vice; if he is treating of poisons he bursts into an eloquent digression against the refinements of Roman sensuality. The main object of his work is to remove superstitious errors and empty fears, and his work may be regarded as a religious continuation of the atheistic speculations of Lucretius.
Whether the wretched epigrams attributed to Seneca are genuine is uncertain; that the ten tragedies which pass under his name are so is generally admitted, and could perhaps never have been doubted but for the distinction which Sidonius Apollinaris makes between Seneca the tragedian and Seneca the philosopher. The isolated testimony of such an author cannot outweigh the evidence of Quintilian, and other writers who were almost Seneca's contemporaries. These tragedies are adapted not so much for the stage as for recitation, and are not to be compared with the great dramas of the Greek poets; but they contain many beauties, and do not at all detract from our high estimate of Seneca's literary abilities.
It has been said that the man who corrupts the style of his age is often as great a genius as the man who improves it. Seneca is a case in point, for to him was mainly due the inferior taste of the later Romans. The desire to say brilliant things—the antitheses and ornaments of his language—in a word, his conceits of rhetoric would, as Niebuhr has remarked, be quite intolerable if they came from a less ingenious man. Quintilian, who was accused of depreciating him, happily observes that "he abounds in beautiful defects, and that one could have wished him to follow his own genius, and some one else's judgment."
Inferior writers imitated his dulceia vitia, without the ability which rendered them endurable; and adopted his picturesque turns of expression, without the thoughtfulness which made them valuable. He has been the special favourite of French writers; and Montaigne and Diderot have spoken warmly in his praise. He was the undoubted source of a great intellectual movement; and we may trace his influence, not only in writers like Florus and Quintus Curtius, but in Pliny, Quintilian, and even Tacitus himself. "Tacite," says Montaigne, "ne tire pas mal à l'escrime de Sénèque;" and although the historian seems to have regarded the philosopher with a little spleen, yet he was, perhaps, indebted to him unconsciously, not only for isolated thought, but for the very idea of his historical style.
Among the editions of Seneca we may mention that of Schottus, Paris, 1607; and the Bipont edition, Strasbourg, 1809. There is a French translation by Lagrange, and an English one by Dr. Thos. Lodge, Lond., 1614. (F.W.R.)