make it altogether probable that both these apostles had been held in great honor by this particular household, and that a suggestion of a friendship with Christians is not wholly arbitrary.
Seneca was one of the greatest of the Stoics. “The Stoical philosophy,” says Frederick Farrar, “may be compared to a torch, which flings a faint gleam here and there in the dusky recesses of a mighty cavern, while Christianity may be compared to the sun, pouring into the inmost depths of the same cavern its sevenfold illumination. The torch had a value and a brightness of its own; but, compared to the dawning of that new glory, it appears to be dim and ineffectual, even though its brightness was a real brightness and had been drawn from the same ethereal source.” Concerning the close of life, Seneca wrote to Lucilius:
I am preparing myself for that day on which, laying aside all artifice or subterfuge, I shall be able to judge respecting myself whether I really speak or merely feel as a brave man should: whether all these words of haughty obstinacy which I have hurled against fortune were mere pretense and pantomime. What you have really achieved will then be manifest when your end is near.
Alas! the trouble with Seneca was that which puts all the great moral philosophers so far below Christ and even his apostles, namely, that he so failed to live up to the precepts that he wrote. It was when he descended from the plane of theory and sentiment to that of practice in daily life that he often ignobly failed.
No complete biography of him has come down to us. The curtain rises and falls over separated scenes in his life. But we know enough to mark his strange inconsistencies. His temporizing management of his imperial pupil, his accumulation of great wealth while he was extolling poverty, his mingling among the extravagancies and corruptions of the imperial court, his apparent failure to express any condemnation of the murders of Britannicus and Agrippina, and his apology for the latter of these horrors, which he wrote for Nero, are enough to be mentioned. It must be admitted that he had a very hard place to fill as an adviser of the emperor, and was often, doubtless, sorely perplexed to know what course of action would be best for the public welfare, but he cannot be acquitted of consent to some of Nero’s crimes.
It was from the Roman army at last that retribution came to the cruel tyrant. He had become uneasy at the murmurs and the gloom that had manifestly increased among the people at his capital. He went for relief to his rural resorts in Campania. Reports of discontent there came to him from the provinces. The army camps contained many who were brooding over wrongs he had done them and were waiting for their revenge.
Among the prominent military men of the day was Servius Sulpicius Galba, who had for some years ruled under the imperial government over a portion of Spain. Descended from an honored family, this man had also achieved for himself renown and was popular with the soldiers. He was, therefore, an object of jealousy to Nero, though he was seventy-three years of age. While Nero was absent from Italy, making exhibitions of himself in public theaters and circuses, in Greece, Galba received some overtures from Caius Julius Vindex, a Roman general in Gaul, who hated Nero for some of his exactions. Vindex felt that there was no chance for himself to be the successor of Nero, but he fixed his eyes on Galba as a possible chief. Galba hesitated to lead a revolution. Meanwhile the plottings of Vindex were discovered and that officer committed suicide.
Galba then felt that he must be more than ever an object of hatred to Nero’s cruelty, and that he might as well proceed in an attempt to restore prosperity to the empire. He harangued the soldiers. They saluted him as emperor, but he would not as yet receive any title but that of Legate of the Senate and Roman people. He, however, enlisted more young men and prepared for a campaign. When the Roman general, Virginius Rufus of lower Germany, entered into communication with him, the news spread far and wide that Nero’s fall was sure. Otho, Nero’s former companion, from his distant station on the shore of the Atlantic, sent messages of cheer to Galba. Roman legions in other parts of the world also respectively hailed their own chiefs as emperor. The empire seemed to be breaking up into pieces.
When Nero’s attention was first called to the handwriting on the wall, as it were, he treated it with contempt and expressed satisfaction at the prospect of confiscating to his own uses the estates of these traitors. He lingered for a while, ridiculously seeking applause for himself by his participation in public entertainments at Naples. After he returned to Rome he dedicated a temple to Poppæa. But he spent much time in trifles, playing and singing and driving the chariot in the circus. When courier after courier dashed into Rome bringing tidings of the rebellion of this or that province, he summoned troops from Illyricum and brought sailors from the fleet at Ostia to defend the city. He threatened to recall the foreign magistrates and disgrace them. He called upon the populace, whom he had pampered, to rise in his behalf or he would let loose his lions upon them. He declared he would massacre those Senators who would not stand by him. Finally, he said he would meet the approaching revolutionists unarmed, trusting to his beauty, his tears, and his persuasive voice. Meanwhile the truly patriotic were happy in the increasing expectation of some deliverance from his yoke.
He had reached Rome in February. By June his cause was hopeless. Galba, it is true, with his forces, had not arrived. But the Prætorian Guard had been turned against him by their prefect, Nymphidius, to whom the camp had been given up by Tigellinus. When told that his last hope of assistance had deceived him, Nero started up from his couch at supper in his Golden House, dashed his choicest cups, which he had been using, to the ground, borrowed a vial of poison and went out to walk restlessly in the neighboring gardens. Afterward he conjured some of the military officers to join him in flight. They all either found excuses or openly refused. Then one, bolder than the rest, said to him: