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 philosophers
with ignorance of life. In his treatise on a Happy Life he is obliged to
introduce a sort of indirect autobiographical apology for his wealth and
position.[37] 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 patrimony 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
_Proedives_, "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 their way
To ruin:--one by one
They tower and they are gone,
Yet in the prophet's soul the dreams of 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."

[Footnote 37: See _Ad. Polyb_. 37: _Ep_. 75; _De Vit. Beat_. 17, 18,
22.]

And in Seneca we see some of the most glowing pictures of the nobility
of poverty combined with the 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.