ce on his
behalf; and he replies with a dissertation on death, and what
good may lie in it, and the folly of fearing it. Cold comfort
for his correspondent; a tactless, strained, theatrical thing to
do, we may call it. But what strain upon his nerves, what
hideous knowledge of the times and of evils he did not see his
way to prevent, what haunting sense of danger, must have driven
him to that fervid hectic eloquence that now seems so unnatural!
One guesses there may be a place in the Pantheons or in Valhalla
of the heroes for this poor not untawdry not unheroic Seneca.
One sees in him a kind of Hamlet, hitting in timorous indecision
on the likely possibility of converting his Claudius by a string
of moral axioms and eloquence to a condition that should satisfy
the Ghost and undo the something rotten in the state.... Yet the
Gods must have been grateful to him for the work he did in
holding for Stoicism and aspiration a center in Rome during that
dreadful darkness. Perhaps only the very strongest, in his
position, could have done better; and then perhaps only by
killing Nero.*

------
* Dill: _Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius._
------

But there was a greater than Seneca in Rome, even in Nero's
reign;--there intermittently, and not to abide: Appollonius of
Tyana, presumably the real Messenger of the age:--and by the
change that had come over life by the second century, we may
judge how great and successful. But there is not getting at the
reality of the man now. We have a _Life_ of him, written about a
hundred years after his death by Philostratus, a Greek sophist,
for the learned Empress Julia Domna, Septimius Severus' wife;
who, no doubt, chose for the work the best man to hand; but the
age of great literature was past, and Philostratus resurrects no
living soul. The account may be correct enough in outline; the
author was painstaking; visited the sites of his subject's
exploits, and pressed his inquiries; he claims to have based his
story on the work of Damis of Neneveh, a disciple of Apollonius
who accompanied him everywhere. But much is fabulous: there is
a gorgeous account of dragons' in India, and the methods used in
hunting them; and you know nothing of the real Apollonius when
you have read it all. Here, in brief, is the outline of the
story: Apollonius was born at Tyana in Cappodocia somewhere
about the year 1 A.D., and died in the reign of Nerva at nearly a
hundred: tradition ascr