  LUCIUS ANNÆUS SENECA, the greatest name in the stoic school of philosophy, and the first of Latin moralists, was born at Corduba (Cordova) almost contemporaneously with the beginning of the Christian era. His family, like that of Ovid, was of the equestrian order. He was of a weakly constitution; and bodily feebleness, as with many other great intellects, served to intensify if not originate, the activity of the mind. At Rome, with which he early made acquaintance, he soon gained great distinction at the bar; and the eloquence and fervour he displayed in the Senate before the Emperor Caligula excited the jealous hatred of that insane tyrant. Later in life he obtained a prÆtorship, and he was also appointed to the tutorship of the young Domitius, afterwards the Emperor Nero. On the accession of that prince, at the age of seventeen, to the imperial throne, Seneca became one of his chief advisers. Unfortunately for his credit as a philosopher, while exerting his influence to restrain the vicious propensities of his old pupil, he seems to have been too anxious to acquire, not only a fair proportion of wealth, but even an enormous fortune, and his villas and gardens were of so splendid a kind as to provoke the jealousy and covetousness of Nero. This, added to his alleged disparagement of the prince’s talents, especially in singing and driving, for which Nero particularly desired to be famous, was the cause of his subsequent disgrace and death. The philosopher prudently attempted to anticipate the will of Nero by a voluntary surrender of all his accumulated possessions, and he sought to disarm the jealous suspicions of the tyrant by a retired and unostentatious life. These precautions were of no avail; his death was already decided. He was accused of complicity in the conspiracy of Piso, and the only grace allowed him was to be his own executioner. The despair of his wife, Pompeia Paulina, he attempted to mitigate by the reflection that his life had been always directed by the standard of a higher morality. Nothing, however, could dissuade her from sharing her husband’s fate, and the two faithful friends laid open their veins by the same blow. Advanced age and his extremely meagre diet had left little blood in Seneca’s veins, and it flowed with painful slowness. His tortures were excessive and, to avoid the intolerable grief of being witnesses of each other’s suffering, they shut themselves up in separate apartments. With that marvellous intrepid tranquillity which characterised some of the old sages, Seneca calmly dictated his last thoughts to his surrounding friends. These were afterwards published. His agonies being still prolonged, he took hemlock; and this also failing, he was carried into a vapour-stove, where he was suffocated, and thus at length ceased to suffer. In estimating the character of Seneca, it is just that we should consider all the circumstances of the exceptional time in which his life was cast. Perhaps there has never been an age or people more utterly corrupt and abandoned than that of the period of the earlier Roman CÆsars and that of Rome and the large cities of the empire. Allowing the utmost that his detractors have brought against him, the moral character of the author of the Consolations and Letters stands out in bright relief as compared with that of the immense majority of his contemporaries of equal rank and position, who were sunk in the depths of licentiousness and of selfish indifference to the miseries of the surrounding world. That his public career was not of so exalted a character altogether as are his moral precepts, is only too patent to be denied and, in this shortcoming of a loftier ideal, he must share reproach with some of the most esteemed of the world’s luminaries. If, for instance, we compare him with Cicero or with Francis Bacon, the comparison would certainly The principal writings of Seneca are:— 1. On Anger. His earliest, and perhaps his best known, work. 2. On Consolation. Addressed to his mother, Helvia. An admirable philosophical exhortation. 3. On Providence; or, Why evils happen to good men though a divine Providence may exist. 4. On Tranquillity of Mind. 5. On Clemency. Addressed to Nero CÆsar. One of the most meritorious writings of all antiquity. It is not unworthy of being classed with the humanitarian protests of Beccaria and Voltaire. The stoical distinction between clemency and pity (misericordia), in book ii., is, as Seneca admits, merely a dispute about words. 6. On the Shortness of Life. In which the proper employment of time and the acquisition of wisdom are eloquently enforced as the best employment of a fleeting life. 7. On a Happy Life. In which he inculcates that there is no happiness without virtue. An excellent treatise. 8. On Kindnesses. 9. Epistles to Lucilius. 124 in number. They abound in lessons and precepts in morality and philosophy, and, excepting the De IrÂ, have been the most read, perhaps, of all Seneca’s productions. 10. Questions on Natural History. In seven books. Besides these moral and philosophic works, he composed several tragedies. They were not intended for the stage, but rather as moral lessons. As in all his works, there is much of earnest thought and feeling, although expressed in rhetorical and declamatory language. What especially characterises Seneca’s writings is their remarkably humanitarian spirit. Altogether he is imbued with this, for the most part, very modern feeling in a greater degree than any other writer, Greek or Latin. Plutarch indeed, in his noble Essay on Flesh Eating, is more expressly denunciatory of the barbarism of the Slaughter House, and of the horrible cruelties inseparably connected with it, and evidently felt more deeply the importance of exposing its evils. The Latin moralist, however, deals with a wider range of ethical questions, Jerome, in his Ecclesiastical Writers, hesitates to include him in the catalogue of his saints only because he is not certain of the genuineness of the alleged literary correspondence between Seneca and St. Paul. We may observe, in passing, on the remarkable coincidence of the presence of the two greatest teachers of the old and the new faiths in the capital of the Roman Empire at the same time; and it is possible, or rather highly probable, that St. Paul was acquainted with the writings of Seneca; while, from the total silence of the pagan philosopher, it seems that he knew nothing of the Pauline epistles or teaching. Amongst many testimonies to the superiority of Seneca, Tacitus, the great historian of the empire, speaks of the “splendour and celebrity of his philosophic writings,” as well as of his “amiable genius”—ingenium amoenum. (Annals, xii., xiii.) The elder Pliny writes of him as “at the very head of all the learned men of that time.” (xiv. 4.) Petrarch quotes the testimony of Plutarch, “that great man who, Greek though he was freely confesses ‘that there is no Greek writer who could be brought into comparison with him in the department of morals.’” The following passage is to be found in a letter to Lucilius, in which, after expatiating on the sublimity of the teaching of the philosopher Attalus in inculcating moderation and self-control in corporeal pleasures, Seneca thus enunciates his dietetic opinions:— “Since I have begun to confide to you with what exceeding ardour I approached the study of philosophy in my youth, I shall not be ashamed to confess the affection “Moved by these and similar arguments, I resolved to abstain from flesh meat, and at the end of a year the habit of abstinence was not only easy but delightful. I firmly believed that the faculties of my mind were more active, “This I tell,” he proceeds, “to prove to you how powerful are the early impetuses of youth to what is truest and best under the exhortations and incentives of virtuous teachers. We err partly through the fault of our guides, who teach us how to dispute, not how to live; partly by our own fault in expecting our teachers to cultivate not so much the disposition of the mind as the faculties of the intellect. Hence it is that in place of a love of wisdom there is only a love of words (Itaque quÆ philosophia fuit, facta philologia est).”—Epistola cviii. Seneca here cautiously reveals the jealous suspicion with which the first CÆsars viewed all foreign, and especially quasi-religious, innovations, and his own public compliance, to some extent, with the orthodox dietetic practices. Yet that in private life he continued to practise, as well as to preach, a radical dietary reformation is sufficiently evident to all who are conversant with his various writings. The refinement and gentleness of his ethics are everywhere apparent, and exhibit him as a man of extraordinary sensibility and feeling. As for dietetics, he makes it a matter of the first importance, on which he is never weary of insisting. “December is the month,” he begins his letter, “when the city [Rome] most especially gives itself up to riotous living (desudat). Free licence is allowed to the public luxury. Every place resounds with the gigantic preparations for eating and gorging, just as if,” he adds, “the whole year were not a sort of Saturnalia.” He contrasts with all this waste and gluttony the simplicity and frugality of Epikurus, who, in a letter to his friend PolyÆnus, declares that his own food does not cost him sixpence a day; while his friend Metrodorus, who had not advanced so far in frugality, expended the whole of that small sum:— “Do you ask if that can supply due nourishment? Yes; and pleasure too. Not, indeed, that fleeting and superficial pleasure which needs to be perpetually recruited, but a solid and substantial one. Bread and pearl-barley (polenta) certainly is not luxurious feeding, but it is no little advantage to be able to receive pleasure from a simple diet of which no change of fortune can deprive one.... Nature demands bread and water only: no one is poor in regard to those necessaries.” Again, Seneca writes:— “How long shall we weary heaven with petitions for superfluous luxuries, as though we had not at hand wherewithal to feed ourselves? How long shall we fill our plains with huge cities? How long shall the people slave for us unnecessarily? How long shall countless numbers of ships from every sea bring us provisions for the consumption of a single month? An Ox is satisfied with the pasture of an acre or two: one wood suffices for several Elephants. Man alone supports himself by the pillage of the whole earth and sea. What! Has Nature indeed given us so insatiable a stomach, while she has given us so insignificant bodies? No: it is not the hunger of our stomachs, but insatiable covetousness (ambitio) which costs so much. The slaves of the belly (as says Sallust) are to be counted in the number of the lower animals, not of men. Nay, not of them, but rather of the dead.... You might inscribe on their doors, ‘These have anticipated death.’”—(Ep. lx.) The extreme difficulty of abstinence is oftentimes alleged:— “It is disagreeable, you say, to abstain from the pleasures of the customary diet. Such abstinence is, I grant, difficult at first. But in course of time the desire for that diet will begin to languish; the incentives to our unnatural wants failing, the stomach, at first rebellious, will after a time feel an aversion for what formerly it eagerly coveted. The desire dies of itself, and it is no severe loss to be without those things that you have ceased to long for. Add to this that there is no disease, no pain, which is not certainly intermitted or relieved, or cured altogether. Moreover it is possible for you to be on your guard against a threatened return of the disease, and to oppose remedies if it comes upon you.”—(Ep. lxxviii.) On the occasion of a shipwreck, when his fellow-passengers found themselves forced to live upon the scantiest fare, he takes the opportunity to point out how extravagantly superfluous must be the ordinary living of the richer part of the community:— “How easily we can dispense with these superfluities, which, when necessity takes them from us, we do not feel the want of.... Whenever I happen to be in the company of richly-living people I cannot prevent a blush of shame, because I see evident proof that the principles which I approve and commend have as yet no sure and firm faith placed in them.... A warning voice needs to be published abroad in opposition to the prevailing opinion of the human race: ‘You are out of your senses (insanitis); you are wandering from the path of right; you are lost in stupid admiration for superfluous luxuries; you value no one thing for its proper worth.’”—(Ep. lxxxvii.) Again:— “I now turn to you, whose insatiable and unfathomable gluttony (profunda et insatiabilis gula) searches every land and every sea. Some animals it persecutes with snares and traps, with hunting-nets [the customary method of the battue of that period], with hooks, sparing no sort of toil to obtain them. Excepting from mere caprice or daintiness, there is no peace allowed to any species of beings. Yet how much of all these feasts which you obtain by the agency of innumerable hands do you even so much as touch with your lips, satiated as they are with luxuries? How much of that animal, which has been caught with so much expense or peril, does the dyspeptic and bilious owner taste? Unhappy even in this! that you perceive not that you hunger more than your belly. Study,” he concludes his exhortation to his friend, “not to know more, but to know better.” Again:— “If the human race would but listen to the voice of reason, it would recognise that [fashionable] cooks are as superfluous as soldiers.... Wisdom engages in all useful things, is favourable to peace, and summons the whole human species to concord.”—(Ep. xc.) “In the simpler times there was no need of so large a supernumerary force of medical men, nor of so many surgical instruments or of so many boxes of drugs. Health was simple for a simple reason. Many dishes have induced many diseases. Note how vast a quantity of lives one stomach absorbs—devastator of land and sea. We must be content with giving our readers only one more of Seneca’s exhortations to a reform in diet:— “You think it a great matter that you can bring yourself to live without all the apparatus of fashionable dishes; that you do not desire wild boars of a thousand pounds weight or the tongues of rare birds, and other portents of a luxury which now despises whole carcases, If Seneca makes dietetics of the first importance, he at the same time by no means neglects the other departments of ethics, which, for the most part, ultimately depend upon that fundamental reformation; and he is equally excellent on them all. Space will not allow us to present our readers with all the admirable dicta of this great moralist. We cannot resist, however, the temptation to quote some of his unique teaching on certain branches of humanitarianism and philosophy little regarded either in his own time or in later ages. Slaves, both in pagan and Christian Europe, were regarded very much as the domesticated non-human species are at the present day, as born merely for the will and pleasure of their masters. Such seems to have been the universal estimate of their status. While often superior to their lords, nationally and individually, by birth, by mind, and by education, they were at the arbitrary disposal of too often cruel and capricious owners:— “Are they slaves?” eloquently demands Seneca. “Nay, they are men. Are they slaves? Nay, they live under the same roof (contubernales). Are they slaves? Nay, they are humble friends. Are they slaves? Nay, they are fellow-servants (conservi), if you will consider that both master and servant are equally the creatures of chance. I smile, then, at the prevalent opinion which thinks it a disgrace for one to sit down to a meal with his servant. Why is it thought a disgrace, but because arrogant Custom allows a master a crowd of servants to stand round him while he is feasting?” He expressly denounces their cruel and contemptuous treatment, and demands in noble language (afterwards used by Epictetus, himself a slave):— “Would you suppose that he whom you call a slave has the same origin and birth as yourself? has the same free air of heaven with yourself? that he breathes, lives, and dies like yourself?” He denounces the haughty and insulting attitude of masters towards their helpless dependants, and lays down the precept: “So live with your dependant as you would wish your superior to live with you.” He laments the use of the term “slaves,” or “servants” (servi), in place of the old “domestics” (familiares). He declaims against the common prejudice which judges by the outward appearance:— “That man,” he asserts, “is of the stupidest sort who values another either by his dress or by his condition.” Is he a slave? He is, it may be, free in mind. He is the true slave who is a slave to cruelty, to ambition, to avarice, to pleasure. “Love,” he declares, insisting upon humanity, “cannot co-exist with fear.”—(Ep. xlviii.) He is equally clear upon the ferocity and barbarity of the gladiatorial and other shows of the Circus, which were looked upon by his contemporaries as not only interesting spectacles, but as a useful school for war and endurance—much for the same reason as that on which the “sports” of the present day are defended. Cicero uses this argument, and only expresses the general sentiment. Not so Seneca. He speaks of a chance visit to the Circus (the gigantic Colosseum was not yet built), for the sake of mental relaxation, expecting to see, at the period of the day he had chosen, only innocent exercises. He indignantly narrates the horrid and bloody scenes of suffering, and demands, with only too much reason, whether it is not evident that such evil examples receive their righteous retribution in the deterioration of character of those who encourage them:— “Ah! what dense mists of darkness do power and prosperity cast over the human mind. He [the magistrate] believes himself to be raised above the common lot of mortality, and to be at the pinnacle of glory, when he has offered so many crowds of wretched human beings to the assaults of wild beasts; when he forces animals of the most different species to engage in conflict; when in the full presence of the Roman populace he causes torrents of blood to flow, a fitting school for the future scenes of still greater bloodshed.” In his treatise On Clemency, dedicated to his youthful pupil Nero, he anticipates the very modern theory—theory, for the prevalent practice is a very different thing—that prevention is better than punishment, and he denounces the cruel and selfish policy of princes and magistrates, who are, for the most part, concerned only to punish the criminals produced by unjust and unequal laws:— “Will not that man,” he asks, “appear to be a very bad father who punishes his children, even for the slightest causes, with constant blows? Which preceptor is the worthier to teach—the one who scarifies his pupils’ backs if their memory happens to fail them, or if their eyes make a slight blunder in reading, or he who chooses rather to correct and instruct by admonition and the influence of shame?... You will find that those crimes are most often committed which are most often punished.... Many capital punishments are no less disgraceful to a ruler than are many deaths to a physician. Men are more easily governed by mild laws. The human mind is naturally stubborn and inclined to be perverse, and it more readily follows than is forced. The disposition to cruelty which takes delight in blood and wounds is the characteristic of wild beasts; it is to throw away the human character and to pass into that of a denizen of the woods.” Speaking of giving assistance to the needy, he says that the genuine philanthropist will give his money— “Not in that insulting way in which the great majority of those who wish to seem merciful disdain and despise those whom they help, and shrink from contact with them, but as one mortal to a fellow-mortal he will give as though out of a treasury that should be common to all.” Next to the De Clementi and the De Ir (“On Anger”), his treatise On the Happy Life is most admirable. In the abundance of what is unusually good and useful it is difficult to choose. His warning (so unheeded) against implicit confidence in authority and tradition cannot be too often repeated:— “There is nothing against which we ought to be more on our guard than, like a flock of sheep, following the crowd of those who have preceded us—going, as we do, not where we ought to go, but where men have walked before. And yet there is nothing which involves us in greater evils than following and settling our faith upon authority—considering those dogmas or practices best which have been received heretofore with the greatest applause, and which have a multitude of great names. We live not according to reason, but according to mere fashion and tradition, from whence that enormous heap of bodies, which fall one over the other. It happens as in a great slaughter of men, when the crowd presses upon itself. Not one falls without dragging with him another. The first to fall are the cause of destruction to the succeeding ranks. It runs through the whole of human life. No-one’s error is limited to himself alone, but he is the author and cause of Again:— “I will do nothing for the sake of opinion; everything for the sake of conscience.” He repudiates the doctrines of Egoism for those of Altruism:— “I will so live, as knowing myself to have come into the world for others.... I shall recognise the world as my proper country. Whenever nature or reason shall demand my last breath I shall depart with the testimony that I have loved a good conscience, useful pursuits—that I have encroached upon the liberty of no one, least of all my own.” Very admirable are his rebukes of unjust and insensate anger in regard to the non-human species:— “As it is the characteristic of a madman to be in a rage with lifeless objects, so also is it to be angry with dumb animals, Again, of anger, as between human beings:— “The faults of others we keep constantly before us; our own we hide behind us.... A large proportion of mankind are angry, not with the sins, but with the sinners. In regard to reported offences; many speak falsely to deceive, many because they are themselves deceived.” Of the use of self-examination, he quotes the example of his excellent preceptor, Sextius, who strictly followed the Pythagorean precept to examine oneself each night before sleep:— “Of what bad practice have you cured yourself to-day? What vice have you resisted? In what respect are you the better? Rash anger will be moderated and finally cease when it finds itself daily confronted with its judge. What, then, is more useful than this custom of thoroughly weighing the actions of the entire day?” He adduces the feebleness and shortness of human life as one of the most forcible arguments against the indulgence of malevolence:— “Nothing will be of more avail than reflections on the nature of mortality. Let each one say to himself, as to another, ‘What good is it to declare enmity against such and such persons, as though we were born to live for ever, and to thus waste our very brief existence? What profit is it to employ time which might be spent in honourable pleasures in inflicting pain and torture upon any of our fellow-beings?’ ... Why rush we to battle? Why do we provoke quarrels? Why, forgetful of our mortal weakness, do we engage in huge hatreds? Fragile beings as we are, why will we rise up to crush others?... Why do we tumultuously and seditiously set life in an uproar? Death stands staring us in the face, and approaches ever nearer and nearer. That moment which you destine for another’s destruction perchance may be for your own.... Behold! death comes, which makes us all equal. Whilst we are in this mortal life, let us cultivate humanity; let us not be a cause of fear or of danger to any of our fellow-mortals. Let us contemn losses, injuries, insults. Let us bear with magnanimity the brief inconveniences of life.” Again, in dealing with the weak and defenceless:— “Let each one say to himself, whenever he is provoked, ‘What right have I to punish with whips or fetters a slave who has offended me by voice or manner? Who am I, whose ears it is such a monstrous crime to offend? Many grant pardon to their enemies; shall I not pardon simply idle, negligent, or garrulous slaves?’ Tender years should shield childhood—their sex, women—individual liberty, a stranger—the common roof, a domestic. Does he offend now for the first time? Let us think how often he may have pleased us.”—(De Ir iii., passim.) As to the conduct of life:— “We ought so to live, as though in the sight of all men. We ought so to employ our thoughts, as though someone were able to inspect our inmost soul—and there is one able. For what advantages it that a thing is hidden from men; nothing is hidden from God. (Ep. 83.) ... Would you propitiate heaven? Be good. He worships the gods, who imitates [the higher ideal of] them. How do we act? What principles do we lay down? That we are to refrain from human bloodshed? Is it a great matter to refrain from injuring him to whom you are bound to do good? The whole of human and divine teaching is summed up in this one principle—we are all members of one mighty body. Nature has made us of one kin (cognatos), since she has produced us from the same elements and will resolve us into the same elements. She has implanted in us love one for another, and made us for living together in society. She has laid down the laws of right and justice, by which ordinance it is more wretched to injure than to be injured; and by her ordering, our hands are given us to help each the other.... Let us ask what things are, not what they are called. Let us value each thing on its own merits, without thought of the world’s opinion. Let us love temperance; let us, before all things, cherish justice.... Our actions will not be right unless the will is first right, for from that proceeds the act.” Again:— “The will will not be right unless the habits of mind are right, for from these results the will. The habits of thought, however, will not be at the best unless they shall have been based upon the laws of the whole of life; unless they shall have tried all things by the test of truth.”—(Ep. xcv.) Excellent is his advice on the choice of books and of reading:— “Be careful that the reading of many authors, and of every sort of books, does not induce a certain vagueness and uncertainty of mind. We ought to linger over and nourish our minds with, writers of assured genius and worth, if we wish to extract something which may usefully remain fixed in the mind. A multitude of books distracts the mind. Read always, then, books of approved merit. If ever you have a wish to go for a time to other kinds of books, yet always return to the former.” In his 88th Letter Seneca well exposes the folly of a learning which begins and ends in mere words, which has no real bearing on the conduct of life and the instruction of the moral faculties:— “In testing the value of books and writers, let us see whether or no they teach virtue.... You inquire minutely about the wanderings of Ulysses rather than work for the prevention of error in your own case. We have no leisure to hear exactly how and where he was tossed about between Italy and Sicily.... The tempests of the soul are ever tossing us, and evildoing urges us into all the miseries of Ulysses.... Oh marvellously excellent education! By it you can measure circles and squares, and all the distances of the stars. There is nothing that is not within the reach of your geometry. Since you are so able a mechanician, measure the human mind. Tell me how great it is, how small it is (pusillus). You know what a straight line is. What does it profit you, if you know not what is straight (rectum) in life.” “Humanity forbids us to be arrogant towards our fellows; forbids us to be grasping; shows itself kind and courteous to all, in word, deed, and thought; thinks no evil of another, but rather loves its own highest good, chiefly because it will be of good to another. Do liberal studies [always] inculcate these maxims? No more than they do simplicity of character and moderation; no more than they do frugality and economy of living; no more than they do mercy, which is as sparing of another’s blood as it is of its own, and recognises that man is not to use the services of his fellows unnecessarily or prodigally. “Wisdom is a great, a vast subject. It needs all the spare time that can be given to it.... Whatever amount of natural and moral questions you may have mastered, you will still be wearied with the vast abundance of questions to be asked and solved. So many, so great, are these questions, all superfluous things must be removed from the mind, that it may have free scope for exercise. Shall I waste my life in mere words (syllabis)? Thus does it come about that the learned are more anxious to talk than to live. Mark what mischief excessive subtlety of mind produces, and how dangerous it may be to truth.”—(Ep. lxxxviii.) Elsewhere he indignantly demands:— “What is more vile or disgraceful than a learning which catches at popular applause (clamores)?”—(Ep. lii.) Anticipating the ultimate triumph of Truth, he well says:— “No virtue is really lost—that it has to remain hidden for a time is no loss to itself. A day will come which will publish the truth at present neglected and oppressed by the malignity (malignitas) of its age. He who thinks the world to be of his own age only, is born for the few. Many thousands of years, many millions of people, will supervene. Look forward to that time. Though the envy of your own day shall have condemned you to obscurity, there will come those who will judge you without fear or favour. If there is any reward for virtue from fame, that is imperishable. The talk of posterity, indeed, will be nothing to us. Yet it will revere us, even though we are insensible to its praise; and it will frequently consult us.... What now deceives has not the elements of duration. Falsehood is thinly disguised; it is transparent, if only you look close enough.”—(Ep. lxix.) In his Questions on Nature, in which he often shows himself to have been much in advance of his contemporaries, and, indeed, of the whole mediÆval ages, in scientific acumen, he takes occasion to reprobate the common practice of glorifying the lives and deeds of worthless princes and others, and exclaims in the modern spirit:— “How much better to try to extinguish the evils of our own age than to glorify the bad deeds of others to posterity! How much better to celebrate the works of Nature [deorum] than the piracies of a Philip or Alexander and of the rest who, become illustrious by the calamities of nations, have been no less the pests of mankind than an inundation which devastates a whole country, or a conflagration in which a large proportion of living creatures is consumed.”—(QuÆst. Nat. iii.) It will be sufficiently apparent, from what we have presented to our readers, that Seneca, though nominally of the Stoic school, belonged in reality to no special sect or party. Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri. Bound to the words of no one master, he sought for truth everywhere. The authority whom he most frequently quotes with approval is Epicurus, the arch-enemy of Stoicism. Wiser and more candid than the great mass of sectaries, he scorns the tactics of partisanship. He justly recognises the fact that the “luxurious egoists have not derived their impulse or sanction from Epicurus; but, abandoned to their vices, they disguise their selfishness in the name of his philosophy.” He professes his own conviction to be “against the common prejudice of the popular writers of my own school, that the teaching of Epicurus was just and holy, and, on a close examination, essentially grave and sober.... I affirm this, that he is ill-understood, defamed, and depreciated.” (De Vit BeatÂ, xii, xiii.) It will also be sufficiently clear that the ethics of Seneca consist of no mere trials of skill in logomachy; in finely-drawn distinctions between words and names, as do so large a proportion both of modern and ancient dialectics. If so daring a heresy may possibly be forgiven us, we would venture to suggest that the authorities of our schools and universities might, with no inconsiderable advantage, substitute judicious excerpts from the Morals of Seneca for the Ethics of Aristotle; or, as Latin literature is now in question, even for the De Officiis of Cicero. This, however, is perhaps to indulge Utopian speculation too greatly. The mediÆval spirit of scholasticism is not yet sufficiently out of favour at the ancient schools of Aquinas and Scotus. |
|
