is one that sets his avarice in a very unfavourable light.
When his famous son, the unhappy poet, had forfeited his life, as well
as covered himself with infamy by denouncing his own mother Attila in
the conspiracy of Piso, Mela, instead of being overwhelmed with shame
and agony, immediately began to collect with indecent avidity his son's
debts, as though to show Nero that he felt no great sorrow for his
bereavement. But this was not enough for Nero's malice; he told Mela
that he must follow his son, and Mela was forced to obey the order,
and to die.

[Footnote 4: M. Ann. Senec. _Controv_. ii. _Praef_.]

Doubtless Helvia, if she survived her sons and grandsons, must have
bitterly rued the day when, with her husband and her young children, she
left the quiet retreat of a life in Cordova. Each of the three boys grew
up to a man of genius, and each of them grew up to stain his memory with
deeds that had been better left undone, and to die violent deaths by
their own hands or by a tyrant's will. Mela died as we have seen; his
son Lucan and his brother Seneca were driven to death by the cruel
orders of Nero. Gallio, after stooping to panic-stricken supplications
for his preservation, died ultimately by suicide. It was a shameful and
miserable end for them all, but it was due partly to their own errors,
partly to the hard necessity of the degraded times in which they lived.

CHAPTER II.

THE EDUCATION OF SENECA.

For a reason which I have already indicated--I mean the habitual
reticence of the ancient writers respecting the period of their
boyhood--it is not easy to form a very vivid conception of the kind of
education given to a Roman boy of good family up to the age of fifteen,
when he laid aside the golden amulet and embroidered toga to assume a
more independent mode of life.

A few facts, however, we can gather from the scattered allusions of the
poets Horace, Juvenal, Martial, and Persius. From these we learn that
the schoolmasters were for the most part underpaid and despised,[5]
while at the same time an erudition alike minute and useless was rigidly
demanded of them. We learn also that they were exceedingly severe in the
infliction of corporeal punishment; Orbilius, the schoolmaster of
Horace, appears to have been a perfect Dr. Busby, and the poet Martial
records with indignation the barbarities of chastisement which he daily
witnessed.

[Footnote 5: For the miseries of the literary class, and especially