‘Cornutus,’ said the statesman—and as he said it he sighed deeply—‘your lot is humbler and happier than mine. I do not follow, but I assent; I am crushed by an awful weight of uncertainty, and sometimes life seems a chaos of vanities.I wish to rise to a loftier grade of virtue, but I am preoccupied with faults. All I can require of myself is, not to be equal to the best, but only to be better than the bad.’[11]
‘He who aims highest,’ said the uncompromising freedman, ‘will reach the loftiest ideal. And surely it is hypocrisy to use fine phrases when you do not intend to put your own advice into practice.’
Seneca was always a little touchy about his style, and he was now thoroughly angry, for he was not accustomed to be thus bluntly addressed by one so immeasurably beneath him in rank. ‘Fine phrases!’ he repeated, in a tone of deep offence. ‘It pleases you to be rude, Cornutus. Perhaps the day will come when the “fine phrases” of Seneca will still be read, though the name of Cornutus, and even of Musonius, is forgotten.’
‘Very possibly,’ answered the uncompromising freedman. ‘Nevertheless, I agree with Musonius that stylists who do not act up to their own precepts should be called fiddlers and not philosophers.’
When Cornutus rose to leave, the feelings of the most envied man in Rome were far from enviable. He would have given much to secure the Stoic’s approval. And yet the sophistries by which he blinded his own bitter feelings were unshaken. ‘Cornutus,’ he said to himself, ‘is not only discourteous but unpractical. Theory is one thing; life another. We are in Rome, not in Plato’s Atlantis.’
Seneca lived to find out that facing both ways is certain failure, and that a man cannot serve two masters.
In point of fact the struggle was going on for the preponderance of influence over Nero. Agrippina thought that she could use him as a gilded figurehead of the ship of state, while she stood at the helm and directed the real course. Burrus and Seneca, distrusting her cruelty and ambition, believed that they could render her schemes nugatory, and convert Nero into a constitutional prince. Both efforts were alike foiled. The passions which were latent in the temperament of the young Emperor were forced into rank growth by influences incomparably less virile than that of his mother, and incomparably more vile than those of the soldier and the philosopher. Otho was a more effective tutor than Seneca, and Seneca’s own vacillation paved the way for Otho’s corrupting spell. Claudius had been governed by an ‘aristocracy of valets;’ Nero was to be governed neither by the daughter of Germanicus nor by the Stoic moralist, but by a despicable fraternity of minions, actors, and debauchees.
CHAPTER IX
NERO AND HIS COMPANIONS
‘Res pertricosa est, Cotile, bellus homo.’—Martial, iii. 63.
Nero had been spending the morning with some of the new friends whose evil example was rapidly destroying in his mind every germ of decency or virtue. Though it was still but noon, he was dressed in a loose synthesis—a dress of light green, unconfined by any girdle, and he had soft slippers on his feet. This negligence was due only to the desire for selfish comfort, for in other respects he paid extreme attention to his personal appearance. His fair hair was curled and perfumed, and his hands were covered with splendid gems.