“Humanity forbids us to be arrogant towards our fellows; forbids us to be grasping; shows itself kind and courteous to all, in word, deed, and thought; thinks no evil of another, but rather loves its own highest good, chiefly because it will be of good to another. Do liberal studies [always] inculcate these maxims? No more than they do simplicity of character and moderation; no more than they do frugality and economy of living; no more than they do mercy, which is as sparing of another’s blood as it is of its own, and recognises that man is not to use the services of his fellows unnecessarily or prodigally.
“Wisdom is a great, a vast subject. It needs all the spare time that can be given to it.... Whatever amount of natural and moral questions you may have mastered, you will still be wearied with the vast abundance of questions to be asked and solved. So many, so great, are these questions, all superfluous things must be removed from the mind, that it may have free scope for exercise. Shall I waste my life in mere words (syllabis)? Thus does it come about that the learned are more anxious to talk than to live. Mark what mischief excessive subtlety of mind produces, and how dangerous it may be to truth.”—(Ep. lxxxviii.)
Elsewhere he indignantly demands:—
“What is more vile or disgraceful than a learning which catches at popular applause (clamores)?”—(Ep. lii.)
Anticipating the ultimate triumph of Truth, he well says:—
“No virtue is really lost—that it has to remain hidden for a time is no loss to itself. A day will come which will publish the truth at present neglected and oppressed by the malignity (malignitas) of its age. He who thinks the world to be of his own age only, is born for the few. Many thousands of years, many millions of people, will supervene. Look forward to that time. Though the envy of your own day shall have condemned you to obscurity, there will come those who will judge you without fear or favour. If there is any reward for virtue from fame, that is imperishable. The talk of posterity, indeed, will be nothing to us. Yet it will revere us, even though we are insensible to its praise; and it will frequently consult us.... What now deceives has not the elements of duration. Falsehood is thinly disguised; it is transparent, if only you look close enough.”—(Ep. lxix.)
In his Questions on Nature, in which he often shows himself to have been much in advance of his contemporaries, and, indeed, of the whole mediæval ages, in scientific acumen, he takes occasion to reprobate the common practice of glorifying the lives and deeds of worthless princes and others, and exclaims in the modern spirit:—
“How much better to try to extinguish the evils of our own age than to glorify the bad deeds of others to posterity! How much better to celebrate the works of Nature [deorum] than the piracies of a Philip or Alexander and of the rest who, become illustrious by the calamities of nations, have been no less the pests of mankind than an inundation which devastates a whole country, or a conflagration in which a large proportion of living creatures is consumed.”—(Quæst. Nat. iii.)
It will be sufficiently apparent, from what we have presented to our readers, that Seneca, though nominally of the Stoic school, belonged in reality to no special sect or party. Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri. Bound to the words of no one master, he sought for truth everywhere. The authority whom he most frequently quotes with approval is Epicurus, the arch-enemy of Stoicism. Wiser and more candid than the great mass of sectaries, he scorns the tactics of partisanship. He justly recognises the fact that the “luxurious egoists have not derived their impulse or sanction from Epicurus; but, abandoned to their vices, they disguise their selfishness in the name of his philosophy.” He professes his own conviction to be “against the common prejudice of the popular writers of my own school, that the teaching of Epicurus was just and holy, and, on a close examination, essentially grave and sober.... I affirm this, that he is ill-understood, defamed, and depreciated.” (De Vitâ Beatâ, xii, xiii.)