Primusque dies dedit extremum.
Non illa Deo vertisse licet
Quæ nexa suis currunt causis.
It cuique ratus, prece non ulla
Mobilis, ordo.
Œdip. 980.
We are led by destiny—yield then to its power. Anxious care cannot change the thread spun by the distaff of the Fates. Whatever we mortals do or suffer comes from on high; and Lachesis observes the decrees of the wheel which revolves beneath her pitiless hand. All things proceed in a fixed path, and the first day of life has determined the last. God has not power to change the chain of causes and effects. Each has its fixed order, which no prayers can alter.
Even the philosophical inconsistencies[[1043]] traceable in the prose treatises are repeated in the tragedies. In one letter[[1044]] he affirms his belief that the soul of Scipio Africanus has ascended into heaven as a reward of his virtue and piety; in another[[1045]] he asserts the gloomy doctrine that death is annihilation: “Mors est non esse.” In like manner in the “Troades” the Chorus declares that the happy Priam wanders amongst pious souls in the “safe Elysian shades;”[[1046]] and yet, with an inconsistency which the Letters of the philosopher alone account for, another passage in the same tragedy declares that the spirit vanishes like smoke, that after death is nothingness, and death itself is nothing.[[1047]]
On such internal evidence as this rests the probability, almost amounting to certainty, that Seneca the philosopher, and the author of the ten tragedies, are one and the same.[[1048]]
Notwithstanding their false rhetorical taste, and the absence of all ideal and creative genius, the tragedies of Seneca found many admirers and imitators in modern times. The French school of tragic poets took them for their model: Corneille evidently considered them the ideal of tragedy, and Racine servilely imitated them. Their philosophy captivated an age which thought that nothing was so sublime as heathen philosophy; and yet that same age derived its notions of ancient philosophy from the Romans instead of from the original Greek sources; and its poetical taste, as far as it was classical, was formed on a study of Roman dramatic literature, before the excellence of the Attic drama was sufficiently known to be appreciated.