The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire. Glover Terrot Reaveley

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СКАЧАТЬ the tone is in keeping with the matter in hand, but it is not always. Everything seems so easy to him that the reader begins to doubt him and to wonder whether he is not after all "The plausiblest Plausible on record." We associate experience with a style more plain, more tense, more inevitable; and the extraordinary buoyancy of Seneca's writing suggests that he can hardly have known the agony and bloody sweat of the true teacher. Yet under the easy phrases there lay a real sincerity. From his youth onward he took life seriously, and, so far as is possible for a man of easy good nature, he was in earnest with himself.

      Like other youths of genius, he had had thoughts of suicide, but on reflexion, he tells us, he decided to live, and his reason was characteristic. While for himself he felt equal to dying bravely, he was not so sure that his "kind old father" would be quite so brave in doing without him. It was to philosophy, he says, that he owed his resolution.[125]

      Apart from philosophy, he went through the ordinary course of Roman education. He "wasted time on the grammarians,"[126] whom he never forgave, and at whom, as "guardians of Latin speech"[127] he loved to jest, – and the greatest of all Roman Grammarians paid him back in the familiar style of the pedagogue. Rhetoric came to him no doubt by nature, certainly by environment; it conspicuously haunted his family for three generations.[128] He duly made his appearance at the bar – making more speeches there than Virgil did, and perhaps not disliking it so much. But he did not like it, and, when his father died, he ceased to appear, and by and by found that he had lost the power to plead as he had long before lost the wish.[129]

      On the accession of Claudius to the Imperial throne in 41 A.D., Seneca, now in middle life, was for some reason banished to Corsica, and there for eight weary years he remained, till the Empress Messalina fell. A little treatise, which he wrote to console his mother, survives – couched in the rhetoric she knew so well. If the language is more magnificent than sons usually address to their mothers, it must be remembered that he wrote to console her for misfortunes which he was himself enduring. The familiar maxim that the mind can make itself happy and at home anywhere is rather like a platitude, but it loses something of that character when it comes from the lips of a man actually in exile. Another little work on the subject, which he addressed later on to Polybius, the freedman of Claudius, stands on a different footing, and his admirers could wish he had not written it. There is flattery in it of a painfully cringing tone. "The Emperor did not hurl him down so utterly as never to raise him again; rather he supported him when evil fortune smote him and he tottered; he gently used his godlike hand to sustain him and pleaded with the Senate to spare his life… He will see to his cause… He best knows the time at which to show favour… Under the clemency of Claudius, exiles live more peacefully than princes did under Gaius."[130] But a little is enough of this.

      It is clear that Seneca was not what we call a strong man. A fragile youth, a spirit of great delicacy and sensibility, were no outfit for exile. Nor is it very easy to understand what exile was to the educated Roman. Some were confined to mere rocks, to go round and round them for ever and never leave them. Seneca had of course more space, but what he endured, we may in some measure divine from the diaries and narratives that tell of Napoleon's life on St Helena. The seclusion from the world, the narrow range, the limited number of faces, the red coats, the abhorred monotony, told heavily on every temper, on gaoler and prisoner alike, even on Napoleon; and Seneca's temperament was not of stuff so stern. We may wish he had not broken down, but we cannot be surprised that he did. It was human of him. Perhaps the memory of his own weakness and failure contributed to make him the most sympathetic and the least arrogant of all Stoics.

      Nero

      At last Messalina reached her end, and the new Empress, Agrippina, recalled the exile in 49 A.D., and made him tutor of her son, Nero; and from now till within two years of his death Seneca lived in the circle of the young prince. When Claudius died in 54, Seneca and Burrus became the guardians of the Emperor and virtually ruled the Empire. It was a position of great difficulty. Seneca grew to be immensely rich, and his wealth and his palaces and gardens[131] weakened his influence, while they intensified the jealousy felt for a minister so powerful. Yet perhaps none of his detractors guessed the limits of his power as surely as he came to feel them himself. Some measure of the situation may be taken from what befell when the freedwoman Claudia Acte became the mistress of Nero. "His older friends did not thwart him," says Tacitus, "for here was a girl, who, without harm to anyone, gratified his desires, since he was utterly estranged from his wife Octavia."[132] Later on, we learn, Seneca had to avail himself of Acte's aid to prevent worse scandals.

      In February 55 A.D. the young prince Britannicus was poisoned at Nero's table. He was the son of Claudius and the brother of Octavia – a possible claimant therefore to the Imperial throne. Nero, not more than eighteen years old, told the company quite coolly that it was an epileptic seizure, and the feast went on, while the dead boy was carried out and buried there and then in the rain – in a grave prepared before he had entered the dining-hall.[133] Ten months later Seneca wrote his tractate on Clemency. Nero should ask himself "Am I the elected of the gods to be their vice-gerent on earth? The arbiter of life and death to the nations?" and so forth. He is gently reminded of the great light that fronts the throne; that his anger would be as disastrous as war; that "Kings gain from kindness a greater security, while their cruelty swells the number of their enemies." Seneca wanders a good deal, but his drift is clear – and the wretchedness of his position.

      That Burrus and he had no knowledge of Nero's design to do away with his mother, is the verdict of Nero's latest historian, but to Seneca fell the horrible task of writing the explanatory letter which Nero sent to the Senate when the murder was done. Perhaps to judge him fairly, one would need to have been a Prime Minister. It may have been a necessary thing to do, in order to maintain the world's government, but the letter imposed on nobody, and Thrasea Pætus at once rose from his seat and walked conspicuously out.

      From the year 59 Nero was more than ever his own master. His guardians' repeated condonations had set him free, and the lad, who had "wished he had never learned writing" when he had to sign his first death-warrant, began from now to build up that evil fame for which the murders of his brother and his mother were only the foundation. For three years Seneca and Burrus kept their places – miserably enough. Then Burrus found a happy release in death, and with him died the last of Seneca's influence.[134] Seneca begged the Emperor's leave to retire from the Court, offering him the greater part of his wealth, and it was refused. It had long been upon his mind that he was too rich. In 58 a furious attack was made upon him by "one who had earned the hate of many," Publius Suillius; this man asked in the Senate "by what kind of wisdom or maxims of philosophy" Seneca had amassed in four years a fortune equal to two and a half millions sterling; and he went on to accuse him of intrigue with princesses, of hunting for legacies, and of "draining Italy and the provinces by boundless usury."[135] There was probably a good deal of inference in these charges, if one may judge by the carelessness of evidence which such men show in all ages. Still Seneca felt the taunt, and in a book "On the Happy Life," addressed to his brother Gallic, he dealt with the charge. He did not claim to be a sage (17, 3); his only hope was day by day to lessen his vices – he was still in the thick of them; perhaps he might not reach wisdom, but he would at least live for mankind "as one born for others,"[136] would do nothing for glory, and all for conscience, would be gentle and accessible even to his foes; as for wealth, it gave a wise man more opportunity, but if his riches deserted him, they would take nothing else with them; a philosopher might have wealth, "if it be taken forcibly from no man, stained with no man's blood, won by no wrong done to any, gained without dishonour; if its spending СКАЧАТЬ