fusion of infamous loyalty and venal acclamation
with which he was received. All Rome poured itself forth to meet him;
the Senate appeared in 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
triumph. With haughty mein, 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 was 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 dying man 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 appointed two men as his successors, of
whom the one, Fenius Rufus, was honorable 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 di