Then he embraced Paulina, and, softening for a moment, entreated her not to waste her life in endless grief, but to mitigate the pang of widowhood by ever recalling that the life of her husband had been spent in virtue.
‘I will die with you,’ said Paulina. ‘Let the physician open my veins as well as yours.’
‘I will not check you,’ said Seneca, ‘if such is your glorious desire. Were I to forbid it, I should but leave you to the endurance of future wrongs. If you prefer the dignity of death to the endurance of bereavement, let us both die with courage, though the greater distinction will be yours.’
In truth it would have been strange, and far from creditable, if Seneca had shown any pusillanimity when the hour of his condemnation came. Many of the philosophers had contracted life into a contemplation of death. The constant presentment of death to the mind in days so perilous was natural, and the possibility of a violent death must have been in Seneca’s thoughts as often as though, like Trimalchio, he had possessed a little skeleton of articulated ivory, and had it passed round among his guests at every banquet with the melancholy refrain, ‘What a little nothingness is man!’ Even Lucan, in his short life, had come to the conclusion that ‘Man’s best lot is to know how to die, and the next best to be compelled to die’—
‘Scire mori sors prima viris, sed proxima cogi.’[112]
The veins of Seneca and Paulina were opened with the same cut, but, as Seneca was old and attenuated by asceticism, his blood flowed slowly, and the veins of his legs were also cut. The ancients were under a strange delusion in supposing that bleeding was a mild kind of death. Seneca was so convulsed with agony that, fearing to break down Paulina’s courage, he persuaded her to depart to another room. When she was gone, he began to dictate his last words. They were afterwards published and had been read by Tacitus, but they were so well known that he would not record them. They probably added little or nothing to what he has said about death so many times in his letters to Lucilius. He still lingered in agony, and bade his physician, Statius Annæus, to give him hemlock. When the poison failed to act, he stepped into a hot bath to expedite the flow of blood, and as he did so he sprinkled the slaves nearest to him, saying that it was his libation to Jupiter the Liberator. He was then carried into a bath-room and stifled with the vapour. His body was burnt, by the direction of his will, without any solemnity of funeral. Nero meanwhile had forbidden the suicide of Paulina. Her wounds were bound up, and she recovered; but during the few years of her survival the excessive pallor of her face was a memorial of those tragic hours.
That Seneca’s life was a failure is admitted even by those who justly regard him as a seeker after God. He knocked at the gates of virtue, but he scarcely entered. He lacked consistency; he lacked whole-heartedness. Charity makes us reject the dark charges made against him by the malice of Dion Cassius, but the history of his life shows that he laid himself fatally open to the accusation of hypocrisy. A Christian he certainly was not, though it is far from impossible that, through Pomponia or some other Christian, he may have seen some of the writings of St. Paul, and that this may account for the singular resemblance of tone and expression between some passages. Yet the resemblance is more superficial than real, and between the character of the Christian Apostle and that of the pagan philosopher there is an impassable chasm. In the whole course of his life and in every action and writing of it, St. Paul gave splendid evidence that his convictions swayed the whole current of his being; but Seneca’s high-wrought declamations constitute the self-condemnation of every decisive incident in his personal history. A life dominated by avarice and ambition was unworthy of a professed philosopher; it fell far below the attainments of the humblest of those true Christians whom Nero burnt and Seneca despised. Seneca did little or nothing to make his age more virtuous; the Christians were the salt of the earth. The Pagans fled from despair to suicide; the Christians, in patient submission and joyful hope, meekly accepted the martyr’s crown.
CHAPTER LIX
THE AGONY OF AN EMPRESS
‘Satiety
And sloth, poor counterfeits of thee,