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СКАЧАТЬ of this primeval peace were avarice and luxury.34 The moment when the first nugget flashed its baleful temptations on the eyes of the roaming hunter was the beginning of all human guilt and misery.35 Selfish greed, developing into insatiable appetite, is [pg 11]the original sin which turned the garden into wilderness. In individualist cravings men lost hold on the common wealth of nature. Luxury entered on its downward course, in the search for fresh food and stimulus for appetite, till merely superfluous pleasures led on to those from which untainted nature recoils.36 Man’s boasted conquests over nature, the triumphs of his perverted ingenuity, have bred an illimitable lust, ending in wearied appetite; they have turned those who were brothers into cunning or savage beasts.

      Such a theory of society has, of course, no value or interest in itself. Its interest, like that of similar à priori dreams, lies in the light which it sheds on the social conditions which gave it birth. Like the Germany of Tacitus, and the Social Contract of Rousseau, Seneca’s theory of the evolution of humanity is an oblique satire on the vices of his own age. And not even in Tacitus or Suetonius are to be found more ghastly revelations of a putrescent society, and the ennui and self-loathing which capricious sensualism generates in spirits born for something higher. It may be worth noting that the vices which Seneca treats as most prevalent and deadly are not so much those of sexual impurity, although they were rife enough in his day, as those of greed, gross luxury, treacherous and envious cruelty, the weariness of jaded nerves and exhausted capacities of indulgence.37 It is not the coarse vices of the Suburra, but the more deadly and lingering maladies of the Quirinal and the Esquiline which he is describing. There is a universal lust of gold:38 riches are the one ornament and stay of life. And yet in those days a great fortune was only a splendid servitude.39 It had to be guarded amid perpetual peril and envy. The universal greed and venality are worthily matched by the endless anxiety of those who have won the prize. Human life has become a scene of cruel and selfish egotism, a ferocious struggle of beasts of prey, eager for rapine, and heedless of those who go down in the obscene struggle.40 It is an age when men glorify the fortunate and trample on the fallen. The cunning and cruelty of the wild beast on the throne have taught a lesson of dissimulation to the subject. [pg 12]At such a court it is a miracle to reach old age, and the feat can only be accomplished by accepting insult and injury with a smiling face.41 For him who goes undefended by such armour of hypocrisy there is always ready the rack, the poisoned cup, the order for self-murder. It is characteristic of the detachment of Seneca that he sees the origin of this hateful tyranny. No modern has more clearly discerned the far-reaching curse of slavery.42 Every great house is a miniature of the Empire under a Caligula or Nero, a nursery of pretenders capable of the same enormities. The unchecked power of the master, which could, for the slightest faults, an ill-swept pavement, an unpolished dish, or a sullen look, inflict the most brutal torture,43 produced those cold hearts which gloated over the agony of gallant men in the arena, and applauded in the Senate the tyrant’s latest deed of blood. And the system of household slavery enervated character while it made it heartless and cruel. The Inscriptions confirm Seneca’s picture of the minute division of functions among the household, to anticipate every possible need or caprice of the master.44 Under such a system the master became a helpless dependent. There is real truth, under some ludicrous exaggeration, in the tale of a Roman noble, taking his seat in his sedan after the bath, and requiring the assurance of his slave that he was really seated.45

      It is little wonder that on such lives an utter weariness should settle, the disgust of oversated appetite, which even the most far-fetched luxuries of the orient, the most devilish ingenuity of morbid vice, could hardly arouse. Yet these jaded souls are tortured by an aimless restlessness, which frets and chafes at the slow passing of the hours,46 or vainly hopes to find relief in change of scene.47 The more energetic spirits, with no wholesome field for energy, developed into a class which obtained the name of “Ardeliones.” Seneca,48 Martial,49 and the younger Pliny50 have left us pictures of these idle [pg 13]busybodies, hurrying round the forums, theatres, and great houses, in an idle quest of some trivial object of interest, waiting on patrons who ignore their existence, following some stranger to the grave, rushing pell-mell to the wedding of a much-married lady, or to a scene in the law courts, returning at nightfall, worn out with these silly labours, to tread the same weary round next day. Less innocent were they who daily gathered in the circuli,51 to hear and spread the wildest rumours about the army on the frontier, to kill a woman’s reputation with a hint, to find a sinister meaning in some imperial order, or to gloat in whispers over the last highly-coloured tale of folly or dark guilt from the palace. It was a perilous enjoyment, for, with a smiling face, some seeming friend was probably noting every hint which might be tortured into an accusation before the secret tribunal on the Palatine, or angling for a sneer which might cost its author a fortune, or send him to the rocks of Gyarus.

      In reading Seneca’s writings, especially those of his last years, you are conscious of a horror which hardly ever takes definite shape, a thick stifling air, as it were, charged with lightning. Again and again, you feel a dim terror closing in silently and stealthily, with sudden glimpses of unutterable torture, of cord and rack and flaming tunic.52 You seem to see the sage tossing on his couch of purple under richly panelled ceilings of gold, starting at every sound in the wainscot,53 as he awaits the messenger of death. It is not so much that Seneca fears death itself, although we may suspect that his nerves sometimes gave the lie to his principles. He often hails death as welcome at any age, as the deliverer who strikes off the chain and opens the prison door, the one harbour on a tempestuous and treacherous sea.54 He is grateful for having always open this escape from life’s long torture, and boldly claims the right to anticipate the executioner. The gloom of Seneca seems rather to spring from a sense of the terrible con[pg 14]trast between wealth and state and an ignominious doom which was ever ready to fall. And to his fevered eye all stately rank seems at last but a precipice overhanging the abyss, a mark for treacherous envy or the spitefulness of Fortune.55 “A great fortune is a great servitude,”56 which, if it has been hard to win, is harder still to guard. And all life is full of these pathetic contrasts. Pleasure is nearest neighbour to pain; the summer sea in a moment is boiling in the tempest; the labour of long years is scattered in a day; there is always terror lurking under our deepest peace. And so we reach the sad gospel of a universal pessimism; “nothing is so deceitful and treacherous as the life of man.”57 No one would knowingly accept such a fatal gift, of which the best that can be said is that the torture is short, that our first moment of existence is the first stage to the grave.58 Thus to Seneca, with all his theoretical indifference to things external to the virtuous will, with all his admiration for the invulnerable wisdom, withdrawn in the inner citadel of the soul, and defying the worst that tyrants or fortune could inflict, the taedium vitae became almost unendurable. The interest of all this lies, not in Seneca’s inconsistency, but in the nightmare which brooded on such minds in the reign of Nero.

      Something of the gloom of Seneca was part of the evil heritage of a class, commanding inexhaustible wealth and assailed by boundless temptations to self-indulgence, which had been offered by the conquest of East and West. The weary senses failed to respond to the infinite sensual seductions which surrounded the Roman noble from his earliest years. If he did not succeed in squandering his fortune, he often exhausted too early his capacity for healthy joy in life, and the nemesis of sated appetite and disillusionment too surely cast its shadow over his later years. Prurient slander was rife in those days, and we are not bound to accept all its tales about Seneca. Yet there are passages in his writings which leave the impression that, although he may have cultivated a Pythagorean asceticism in his youth,59 he did not [pg 15]altogether escape the taint of his time.60 His enormous fortune did not all come by happy chance or the bounty of the emperor.61 His gardens and palace, with all its priceless furniture, must have been acquired because at one time he felt pleasure in such luxuries. A soul so passionate in its renunciation may, according to laws of human nature, have been once as passionate in indulgence. In his case, as so often in the history of the Church, the saint may have had a terrible repentance.

      It is probable, however, that this pessimism is more the result of the contrast between Seneca’s ideal of the principate, and the degradation of its power in the hands of his pupil Nero. Seneca may have been regarded once as a possible candidate for the throne, but he was no conspirator or revolutionary.62 He would have condemned the СКАЧАТЬ