But, of all the many deaths which were brought about by this unhappy and ill-managed conspiracy, none caused more delight to Nero than that of Seneca, whom he was now able to dispatch by the sword, since he had been unable to do so by secret poison. What share Seneca really had in the conspiracy is unknown. If he were really cognisant of it, he must have acted with consummate tact, for no particle of convincing evidence was adduced against him. All that even Natalis could relate was, that when Piso had sent him to complain to Seneca of his not admitting Piso to more of his intercourse, Seneca had replied "that it was better for them both to hold aloof from each other, but that his own safety depended on that of Piso." A tribune was sent to ask Seneca as to the truth of this story, and found,--which was in itself regarded as a suspicious circumstance,--that on that very day he had returned from Campania to a villa four miles from the city. The tribune arrived in the evening, and surrounded the villa with soldiers. Seneca was at supper, with his wife Paulina and two friends. He entirely denied the truth of the evidence, and said that "the only reason which he had assigned to Piso for seeing so little of him was his weak health and love of retirement. Nero, who knew how little prone he was to flattery, might judge whether or no it was likely that he, a man of consular rank, would prefer the safety of a man of private station to his own." Such was the message which the tribune took back to Nero, whom he found sitting with his dearest and most detestable advisers, his wife Poppaea and his minister Tigellinus. Nero asked "whether Seneca was preparing a voluntary death." On the tribune replying that he showed no gloom or terror in his language or countenance, Nero ordered that he should at once be bidden to die. The message was taken, and Seneca, without any sign of alarm, quietly demanded leave to revise his will. This was refused him, and he then turned to his friends with the remark that, as he was unable to reward their merits as they had deserved, he would bequeath to them the only, and yet the most precious, possession left to him, namely, the example of his life, and if they were mindful of it they would win the reputation alike for integrity and for faithful friendship. At the same time he checked their tears, sometimes by his conversation, and sometimes with serious reproaches, asking them "where were their precepts of philosophy, and where the fortitude under trials which should have been learnt from the studies of many years? Did not every one know the cruelty of Nero? and what was left for him to do but to make an end of his master and tutor after the murder of his mother and his brother?" He then embraced his wife Paulina, and, with a slight faltering of his lofty sternness, begged and entreated her not to enter on an endless sorrow, but to endure the loss of her husband by the aid of those noble consolations which she must derive from the contemplation of his virtuous life. But Paulina declared that she would die with him, and Seneca, not opposing the deed which would win her such permanent glory, and at the same time unwilling to leave her to future wrongs, yielded to her wish. The veins of their arms were opened by the same blow; but the blood of Seneca, impoverished by old age and temperate living, flowed so slowly that it was necessary also to open the veins of his legs. This mode of death, chosen by the Romans as comparatively painless, is in fact under certain circumstances most agonizing. Worn out by these cruel tortures, and unwilling to weaken his wife's fortitude by so dreadful a spectacle, glad at the same time to spare himself the sight of her sufferings, he persuaded her to go to another room. Even then his eloquence did not fail. It is told of Andrè Chénier, the French poet, that on his way to execution he asked for writing materials to record some of the strange thoughts which filled his mind. The wish was denied him, but Seneca had ample liberty to record his last utterances. Amanuenses were summoned, who took down those dying admonitions, and in the time of Tacitus they still were extant. To us, however, this interesting memorial of a Pagan deathbed is irrevocably lost.
Nero, meanwhile, to whom the news of these circumstances was taken, having no dislike to Paulina, and unwilling to incur the odium of too much bloodshed, ordered her death to be prohibited and her wounds to be bound. She was already unconscious, but her slaves and freedmen succeeded in saving her life. She lived a few years longer, cherishing her husband's memory, and bearing in the attenuation of her frame, and the ghastly pallor of her countenance, the lasting proofs of that deep affection which had characterised their married life.
Seneca was not yet dead, and, to shorten these protracted and useless sufferings, he begged his friend and physician Statius Annaeus to give him a draught of hemlock, the same poison by which the great philosopher of Athens had been put to death. But his limbs were already cold, and the draught proved fruitless. He then entered a bath of hot water, sprinkling the slaves who stood nearest to him, with the words that he was pouring a libation to Jupiter the Liberator.[36] Even the warm water failed to make the blood flow more speedily, and he was finally carried into one of those vapour baths which the Romans called sudatoria, and stifled with its steam. His body was burned privately, without any of the usual ceremonies. Such had been his own wish, expressed, not after the fall of his fortunes, but at a time when his thoughts had been directed to his latter end, in the zenith of his great wealth and conspicuous power.
[36] Sicco Polentone, an Italian, who wrote a Life of Seneca (d. 1461), makes Seneca a secret Christian, and represents this as an invocation of Christ, and says that he baptized himself with the water of the bath!
So died a Pagan philosopher, whose life must always excite our interest and pity, although we cannot apply to him the titles of great or good. He was a man of high genius, of great susceptibility, of an ardent and generous temperament, of far-sighted and sincere humanity. Some of his sentiments are so remarkable for their moral beauty and profundity that they forcibly remind us of the expressions of St. Paul. But Seneca fell infinitely short of his own high standard, and has contemptuously been called "the father of all them that wear shovel hats." Inconsistency is written on the entire history of his life, and it has earned him the scathing contempt with which many writers have treated his memory. "The business of a philosopher," says Lord Macaulay, in his most scornful strain, "was to declaim in praise of poverty, with two millions sterling out at usury; to meditate epigrammatic conceits about the evils of luxury in gardens which moved the envy of sovereigns; to rant about liberty while fawning on the insolent and pampered freedmen of a tyrant; to celebrate the divine beauty of virtue with the same pen which had just before written a defence of the murder of a mother by a son." "Seneca," says Niebuhr, "was an accomplished man of the world, who occupied himself very much with virtue, and may have considered himself to be an ancient Stoic. He certainly believed that he was a most ingenious and virtuous philosopher; but he acted on the principle that, as far as he himself was concerned, he could dispense with the laws of morality which he laid down for others, and that he might give way to his natural propensities."
In Seneca's life, then, we see as clearly as in those of many professing Christians that it is impossible to be at once worldly and righteous. Seneca's utter failure was due to the vain attempt to combine in his own person two opposite characters--that of a Stoic and that of a courtier. Had he been a true philosopher, or a mere courtier, he would have been happier, and even more respected. To be both was absurd: hence, even in his writings, he was driven into inconsistency. He is often compelled to abandon the lofty utterances of Stoicism, and to charge philosophers with ignorance of life. In his treatise on a Happy Life he is obliged to introduce a sort of indirect autobiographical apology for his wealth and position.[37] In spite of his lofty pretensions to simplicity, in spite of that sort of amateur asceticism which, in common with other wealthy Romans, he occasionally practised, in spite of his final offer to abandon his entire patrimony to the Emperor, we fear that he cannot be acquitted of an almost insatiable avarice. We need not indeed believe the fierce calumnies which charged him with exhausting Italy by a boundless usury, and even stirring up a war in Britain by the severity of his exactions; but it is quite clear that he deserved the title of Proedives, "the over-wealthy," by which he has been so pointedly signalized. It is strange that the most splendid intellects should so often have sunk under the slavery of this meanest vice. In the Bible we read how the "rewards of divination" seduced from his allegiance to God the splendid enchanter of Mesopotamia:
"In outline dim and vast
Their fearful shadows cast
The giant form of Empires on their way
To ruin:--one by one
They tower and they are gone,
Yet in the prophet's soul the dreams of avarice stay.
"No sun or star so bright,
In all the world of light,
That they should draw to heaven his downward eye:
He hears the Almighty's word,
He sees the angel's sword,
Yet low upon the earth his heart and treasure lie."
[37] See Ad. Polyb. 37: Ep. 75; De Vit. Beat. 17, 18, 22.
And in Seneca we see some of the most glowing pictures of the nobility of poverty combined with the most questionable avidity in the pursuit of wealth. Yet how completely did he sell himself for naught. It is the lesson which we see in every conspicuously erring life, and it was illustrated less than three years afterwards in the terrible fate of the tyrant who had driven him to death. For a short period of his life, indeed, Seneca was at the summit of power; yet, courtier as he was, he incurred the hatred, the suspicion, and the punishment of all the three Emperors during whose reigns his manhood was passed. "Of all unsuccessful men," says Mr. Froude, "in every shape, whether divine or human, or devilish, there is none equal to Bunyan's Mr. Facing-both-ways--the fellow with one eye on heaven and one on earth--who sincerely preaches one thing and sincerely does another, and from the intensity of his unreality is unable either to see or feel the contradiction. He is substantially trying to cheat both God and the devil, and is in reality only cheating himself and his neighbours. This of all characters upon the earth appears to us to be the one of which there is no hope at all, a character becoming in these days alarmingly abundant; and the aboundance of which makes us find even in a Reineke an inexpressible relief." And, in point of fact, the inconsistency of Seneca's life was a conscious inconsistency. "To the student," he says, "who professes his wish to rise to a loftier grade of virtue, I would answer that this is my wish also, but I dare not hope it. I am preoccupied with vices. All I require of myself is, not to be equal to the best, but only to be better than the bad." No doubt Seneca meant this to be understood merely for modest depreciation; but it was far truer than he would have liked seriously to confess. He must have often and deeply felt that he was not living in accordance with the light which was in him.