The end came in 65, in connexion with the conspiracy of Piso. Tacitus is not altogether distinct as to the implication of Seneca in this plot, but modern historians have inclined to believe in his guilt—if guilt it was.[[43]] Mr Henderson, in particular, is very severe on him for this want of "gratitude" to his benefactor and pupil, but it is difficult to see what Nero had done for him that he would not have preferred undone.[[44]] Perhaps at the time, and certainly later on, Seneca was regarded as a possible substitute for Nero upon the throne;[[45]] but he was well over sixty and frail, nor is it clear that the world had yet decided that a man could be Emperor without being a member of the Julian or Claudian house. Seneca, in fact any man, must have felt that any one would be better than Nero, but he had himself conspicuously left the world, and, with his wife, was living the philosophic life—a vegetarian again, and still a water-drinker.[[46]] Seneca was ready for the death-summons and at once opened his veins. Death came slowly, but it came; and he died, eloquent to the last—novissimo quoque momenta suppeditante eloquentia.

Such is the story of Seneca. Even in bare outline it shows something of his character—his kindliness and sensibility, his weakness and vanity; but there are other features revealed in his books and his many long letters to Lucilius. No Roman, perhaps, ever laid more stress on the duty of gentleness and forgiveness.[[47]] "Look at the City of Rome," he says, "and the crowds unceasingly pouring through its broad streets—what a solitude, what a wilderness it would be, were none left but whom a strict judge would acquit. We have all done wrong (peccavimus), some in greater measure, some in less, some on purpose, some by accident, some by the fault of others; we have not stood bravely enough by our good resolutions; despite our will and our resistance, we have lost our innocence. Nor is it only that we have acted amiss; we shall do so to the end."[[48]] He is anxious to make Stoicism available for his friends; he tones down its gratuitous harshness, accommodates, conciliates. He knows what conscience is; he is recognized as a master in dealing with the mind at variance with itself, so skilfully does he analyse and lay bare its mischiefs. Perhaps he analyses too much—the angel, who bade Hermas cease to ask concerning sins and ask of righteousness, might well have given him a word. But he is always tender with the man to whom he is writing. If he was, as Quintilian suggests, a "splendid assailant of the faults of men," it is the faults of the unnamed that he assails; his friends' faults suggest his own, and he pleads and sympathizes. His style corresponds with the spirit in which he thinks. "You complain," he writes to Lucilius, "that my letters are not very finished in style. Who talks in a finished style unless he wishes to be affected? What my talk would be, if we were sitting or walking together, unlaboured and easy, that is what I wish my letters to be, without anything precious or artificial in them."[[49]] And he has in measure succeeded in giving the air of talk to his writing—its ease, its gaiety, even its rambling and discursiveness. He always sees the friend to whom he writes, and talks to him—sometimes at him—and not without some suggestion of gesticulation. He must have talked well—though one imagines that, like Coleridge on Highgate Hill, he probably preferred the listener who sat "like a passive bucket to be pumped into." Happily the reader is not obliged to be quite so passive.

But we shall not do him justice if we do not recognize his high character. In an age when it was usual to charge every one with foulness, natural and unnatural, Dio Cassius alone among writers suggests it of Seneca; and, quite apart from his particular bias in this case, Dio is not a high authority,—more especially as he belonged to a much later generation. If his talk is of "virtue! virtue!" Seneca's life was deliberately directed to virtue. In the midst of Roman society, and set in the highest place but one in the world, he still cherished ideals, and practised self-discipline, daily self-examination. "This is the one goal of my days and of my nights: this is my task, my thought—to put an end to my old faults."[[50]] His whole philosophy is practical, and directed to the reformation of morals. The Stoic paradoxes, and with them every part of philosophy which has no immediate bearing upon conduct, he threw aside. His language on the accumulation of books recalls the amusement of St Francis at the idea of possessing a breviary. And further, we may note that whatever be charged against him as a statesman, not his own master, and as a writer, not always quite in control of his rhetoric, Seneca was fundamentally truthful with himself. He never hid his own weakness; he never concealed from himself the difficulty of his ideals; he never tried to delude himself with what he could not believe. The Stoics had begun long since to make terms with popular religion, but Seneca is entirely free from delusions as to the gods of popular belief. He saw clearly enough that there was no truth in them, and he never sought help from anything but the real. He is a man, trained in the world,[[51]] in touch with its problems of government, with the individual and his questions of character, death and eternity,—a man tender, pure and true—too great a man to take the purely negative stand of Thrasea, or to practise the virtue of the schools in "arrogant indolence." But he has hardly reached the inner peace which he sought.

The story of Epictetus can be more briefly told, for there is very little to tell.[[52]] He was born at Hierapolis in Phrygia:—he was the slave of Nero's freedman Epaphroditus, and somehow managed to hear the lectures of the Stoic Musonius. Eventually he was set free, and when Domitian expelled the philosophers from Rome, he went to Nicopolis in Epirus,[[53]] where he lived and taught—lame, neat, poor and old. How he taught is to be seen in the discourses which Arrian took down in the reign of Trajan,—"Whatever I heard him say, I tried to write down exactly, and in his very words as far as I could—to keep them as memorials for myself of his mind and of his outspokenness. So they are, as you would expect, very much what a man would say to another on the spur of the moment—not what he would write for others to read afterwards.... His sole aim in speaking was to move the minds of his hearers to the best things. If then these discourses should achieve this, they would have the effect which I think a philosopher's words should have. But if they do not, let my readers know that, when he spoke them, the hearer could not avoid being affected as Epictetus wished him to be. If the discourses do not achieve this, perhaps it will be my fault, or perhaps it may be inevitable. Farewell."

Epictetus on children and women

Such, save for a sentence or two omitted, is Arrian's preface,—thereafter no voice is heard but that of Epictetus. To place, time or persons present the barest allusions only are made. "Someone said ... And Epictetus spoke." The four books of Arrian give a strong impression of fidelity. We hear the tones of the old man, and can recognize "the mind and the outspokenness," which Arrian cherished in memory—we understand why, as we read. The high moral sense of the teacher, his bursts of eloquence, his shrewdness, his abrupt turns of speech, his apostrophes—"Slave!" he cries, as he addresses the weakling—his diminutives of derision, produce the most lively sense of a personality. There is wit, too, but like Stoic wit in general it is hard and not very sympathetic; it has nothing of the charm and delicacy of Plato's humour, nor of its kindliness.

Here and there are words and thoughts which tell of his life. More than once he alludes to his age and his lameness—"A lame old man like me." But perhaps nowhere in literature are there words that speak so loud of a man without experience of woman or child. "On a voyage," he says, "when the ship calls at a port and you go ashore for water, it amuses you to pick up a shell or a plant by the way; but your thoughts ought to be directed to the ship, and you must watch lest the captain call, and then you must throw away all those things, that you may not be flung aboard, tied like the sheep. So in life, suppose that instead of some little shell or plant, you are given something in the way of wife or child (antì bolbaríou kaì kochlidiou gynaikárion kaì paidíon) nothing need hinder. But, if the captain call, run to the ship letting them all go and never looking round. If you are old, do not even go far from the ship, lest you fail to come when called."[[54]] He bids a man endure hunger; he can only die of it. "But my wife and children also suffer hunger, (ohi emoì peinéousi). What then? does their hunger lead to any other place? Is there not for them the same descent, wherever it lead? Below, is it not the same for them as for you?"[[55]] "If you are kissing your child, or brother, or friend, never give full licence to the appearance (tèn phantasían); check your pleasure ... remind yourself that you love a mortal thing, a thing that is not your own (ouden tôn sautoû).... What harm does it do to whisper, as you kiss the child, 'To-morrow you will die'?" This is a thought he uses more than once,[[56]] though he knows the attractiveness of lively children.[[57]] He recommends us to practise resignation—beginning on a broken jug or cup, then on a coat or puppy, and so up to oneself and one's limbs, children, wife or brothers.[[58]] "If a man wishes his son or his wife not to do wrong, he really wishes what is another's not to be another's."[[59]]

As to women, a few quotations will show his detachment. He seems hardly to have known a good woman. "Do not admire your wife's beauty, and you are not angry with the adulterer. Learn that a thief and an adulterer have no place among the things that are yours, but among those which are not yours and not in your power,"[[60]] and he illustrates his philosophy with an anecdote of an iron lamp stolen from him, which he replaced with an earthenware one. From fourteen years old, he says, women think of nothing and aim at nothing but lying with men.[[61]] Roman women liked Plato's Republic for the licence they wrongly supposed it gave.[[62]] He constantly speaks of women as a temptation, nearly always using a diminutive korásion, korasidíon—little girls—and as a temptation hardly to be resisted by young men. He speaks of their "softer voices."[[63]] A young philosopher is no match for a "pretty girl"; let him fly temptation.[[64]] "As to pleasure with women, abstain as far as you can, before marriage; but if you do indulge in it, do it in the way conformable to custom. Do not, however, be disagreeable to those who take such pleasures, nor apt to rebuke them or to say often that you do not."[[65]] All this may be taken as the impression left by Rome and the household of Epaphroditus upon a slave's mind. It may be observed that he makes nothing like Dio Chrysostom's condemnation of prostitution—an utterance unexampled in pagan antiquity.

It is pleasanter to turn to other features of Epictetus. He has a very striking lecture on personal cleanliness.[[66]] In proportion as men draw near the gods by reason, they cling to purity of soul and body. Nature has given men hands and nostrils; so, if a man does not use a handkerchief, "I say, he is not fulfilling the function of a man." Nature has provided water. "It is impossible that some impurity should not remain in the teeth after eating. 'So wash your teeth,' says Nature. Why? 'That you may be a man and not a beast—a pig.'" If a man would not bathe and use the strigil and have his clothes washed—"either go into a desert where you deserve to go, or live alone and smell yourself." He cannot bear a dirty man,—"who does not get out of his way?" It gives philosophy a bad name, he says; but it is quite clear that that was not his chief reason. He would sooner a young man came to him with his hair carefully trimmed than with it dirty and rough; such care implied "some conception of the beautiful," which it was only necessary to direct towards the things of the mind; "but if a man comes to me filthy and dirty, with a moustache down to his knees—what can I say to him?" "But whence am I to get a fine cloak? Man! you have water; wash it!"