ching in the serenity he preserved amidst the
conflict that must have perpetually raged between his natural sense
and his acquired principles. Both Cicero and Seneca were men of many
weaknesses, and we remark them the more because both were pretenders to
unusual strength of character; but while Cicero lapsed into political
errors, Seneca cannot be absolved of actual crime. Nevertheless, if we
may compare the greatest masters of Roman wisdom together, the Stoic
will appear, I think, the more earnest of the two, the more anxious to
do his duty for its own sake, the more sensible of the claims of mankind
upon him for such precepts of virtuous living as he had to give. In an
age of unbelief and compromise he taught that Truth was positive and
Virtue objective. He conceived, what never entered Cicero's mind, the
idea of improving his fellow-creatures; he had, what Cicero had not, a
heart for conversion to Christianity."

To this eloquent account of Seneca's position and of the tendency of his
writings I have nothing to add. The main particulars of his life,
his Spanish extraction (like that of Lacan and Martial), his father's
treatises on Rhetoric, his mother Helvia, his brothers, his wealth, his
exile in Corsica, his outrageous flattery of Claudius and his satiric
poem on his death--"The Vision of Judgment," Merivale calls it, after
Lord Byron--his position as Nero's tutor, and his death, worthy at once
of a Roman and a Stoic, by the orders of that tyrant, may be read of in
"The History of the Romans under the Empire," or in the article "Seneca"
in the "Dictionary of Classical Biography," and need not be reproduced
here: but I cannot resist pointing out how entirely Grote's view of the
"Sophists" as a sort of established clergy, and Seneca's account of the
various sects of philosophers as representing the religious thought of
the time, is illustrated by his anecdote of Julia Augusta, the mother of
Tiberius, better known to English readers as Livia the wife of Augustus,
who in her first agony of grief at the loss of her first husband applied
to his Greek philosopher, Areus, as to a kind of domestic chaplain, for
spiritual consolation. ("Ad Marciam de Consolatione," ch. iv.)

I take this opportunity of expressing my gratitude to the Rev. J. E.
B. Mayor, Professor of Latin in the University of Cambridge, for his
kindness in finding time among his many and important literary labours
for reading and correcting the proofs of this