Seneca gave a calm explanation. He had merely told Piso that he was in weak health, and desired perfect quiet. 'Why,' he said, in reply to the Emperor's inquiry, 'should I have preferred the fortunes of a private person to my own safety? I am no flatterer, that I should have made such a speech. No one knows this better than Nero, who has experienced my boldness more often than my servility.'

When Silvanus brought back the answer, he found Nero sitting with Poppaa and Tigellinus a bad omen for Seneca's safety.

Is he preparing to put himself to death?' asked the Emperor.

'No,' said the tribune. 'He showed no sign of panic. His look and his words were entirely cheerful.'

'Go, bid him die,' was Nero's brief answer.

Silvanus was, however, unwilling to deliver such a mandate in person to a brother conspirator. He sent it in by a centurion.

On receiving it, Seneca quietly rose from table and said to a slave, Bring me my will. I should like to leave a few legacies to those who love me.'

I am sorry,' said the centurion, that the Emperor's commands admit of no such delay.'

'Be it so,' said Seneca, turning to his friends. Since, then, I have nothing else to leave you, I will leave you my fairest possession, the memory of my life. Be mindful of it, and you will win the fame of honest purpose and loyal friendship. Nay, my friends, do not weep. Where is your firmness? Where is your philosophy? I forbid these tears. Have I not been long preparing myself for this crisis? Was any one of us unaware of Nero's cruelty? After murdering his mother and his brother, what remained for him but to kill his tutor?'

Then he embraced Paulina, and, softening for a moment, entreated her not to waste her life in endless grief, but to mitigate the pang of widowhood by ever recalling that the life of her husband had been spent in virtue.

'I will die with you,' said Paulina.

open my veins as well as yours.'

Let the physician

'I will not check you,' said Seneca, ' if such is your glorious desire. Were I to forbid it, I should but leave you to the

endurance of future wrongs. If you prefer the dignity of death to the endurance of bereavement, let us both die with courage, though the greater distinction will be yours.'

In truth it would have been strange, and far from creditable, if Seneca had shown any pusillanimity when the hour of his condemnation came. Many of the philosophers had contracted life into a contemplation of death. The constant presentment of death to the mind in days so perilous was natural, and the possibility of a violent death must have been in Seneca's thoughts as often as though, like Trimalchio, he had possessed a little skeleton of articulated ivory, and had it passed round among his guests at every banquet with the melancholy refrain, What a little nothingness is man!' Even Lucan, in his short life, had come to the conclusion that Man's best lot is to know how to die, and the next best to be compelled to die'

6

'Scire mori sors prima viris, sed proxima cogi.'1

The veins of Seneca and Paulina were opened with the same cut, but, as Seneca was old and attenuated by asceticism, his blood flowed slowly, and the veins of his legs were also cut. The ancients were under a strange delusion in supposing that bleeding was a mild kind of death. Seneca was so convulsed with agony that, fearing to break down Paulina's courage, he persuaded her to depart to another room. When she was gone, he began to dictate his last words. They were afterwards published and had been read by Tacitus, but they were so well known that he would not record them. They probably added little or nothing to what he has said about death so many times in his letters to Lucilius. He still lingered in agony, and bade his physician, Statius Annæus, to give him hemlock. When the poison failed to act, he stepped into a hot bath to expedite the flow of blood, and as he did so he sprinkled the slaves nearest to him, saying that it was his libation to Jupiter the Liberator. He was then carried into a bath-room and stifled with the vapour. His body was burnt, by the direction of his will, without any solemnity of funeral. Nero meanwhile had forbidden the suicide of Paulina. Her wounds were bound up, and she recovered; but during the

1 Pharsal. ix. 211.

few years of her survival the excessive pallor of her face. was a memorial of those tragic hours.

That Seneca's life was a failure is admitted even by those who justly regard him as a seeker after God. He knocked at the gates of virtue, but he scarcely entered. He lacked consistency; he lacked whole-heartedness. Charity makes us reject the dark charges made against him by the malice of Dion Cassius, but the history of his life shows that he laid himself fatally open to the accusation of hypocrisy. A Christian he certainly was not, though it is far from impossible that, through Pomponia or some other Christian, he may have seen some of the writings of St. Paul, and that this may account for the singular resemblance of tone and expression between some passages. Yet the resemblance is more superficial than real, and between the character of the Christian Apostle and that of the pagan philosopher there is an impassable chasm. In the whole course of his life and in every action and writing of it, St. Paul gave splendid evidence that his convictions swayed the whole current of his being; but Seneca's high-wrought declamations constitute the self-condemnation of every decisive incident in his personal history. A life dominated by avarice and ambition was unworthy of a professed philosopher; it fell far below the attainments of the humblest of those true Christians whom Nero burnt and Seneca despised. Seneca did little or nothing to make his age more virtuous; the Christians were the salt of the earth. The Pagans fled from despair to suicide; the Christians, in patient submission and joyful hope, meekly accepted the martyr's crown.

CHAPTER LIX

THE AGONY OF AN EMPRESS

'Satiety

And sloth, poor counterfeits of thee,
Mock the tired worlding. Idle Hope

And dire Remembrance interlope,

And vex the feverish slumbers of the mind:

The bubble floats before; the spectre stalks behind.'
COLERIDGE, Ode to Tranquillity.

IN one of the most enchanting rooms of the Golden Palace, surrounded by every object of beauty and splendour which the wealth of kingdoms could supply, sat Poppæa, miserable in heart with a misery which nothing could alleviate - no luxury of the present, no memory of the past, no hope of the future. Like Agrippina, like Seneca, like Nero, she had been 'cursed with every granted prayer. Nothing which this world could give was left for her to attain. Of the honours which overpower, of the riches which clog, of the pleasures which inflame the soul, she had unbounded experience. They had left her heart weary and her life in ashes, and she had never dreamed of the secret which had enabled so many thousands of humble Christians, whom she would have regarded as the dust beneath her feet, to find exaltation in abasement, wealth in penury, and joy in tribulation.

She was Empress; she was Augusta; she was mother of an infant who had been deified; her smile meant prosperity, her frown was death. Of what avail was it all? Could this awful power, could those inestimable gems, could the gorgeousness of her Golden House fill up the void in a heart numbed by satiety and chilled by despair? What had she to aim at? Her enemies had been swept out of her path. What had she left to hope for? There was no object of earthly wishes which she had not attained. Ah! but what work worth doing could she find to do in order to fill up the

vacuity of aimless self-indulgence? Who was there to love her, or whom she could love?

He

She thought of her early home, of her lovely mother, of her consular and triumphant grandfather, of the adoration. which had surrounded her in the days of her own dawning beauty. She thought of Rufius Crispinus, the bridegroom of her youth, who had loved her tenderly, and whom she had loved, and of the little son whom she had borne him. had grown up into a beautiful and gallant child, and the mother had always listened with pride to the anecdotes about him which were secretly brought to her. One of the heaviest of the many afflicting thoughts which were weighing upon her to-day was the manner in which Nero had treated her former husband and her son. Rufius Crispinus had once been Prætorian Præfect, and had been rewarded with consular insignia, but Nero hated his very name because he had been Poppæa's husband; and he had taken advantage of Piso's conspiracy first to banish him to Sardinia and recently to order him to put an end to his life. How fatal had her love been to him! It had blighted his career; it had stained his home; it had cut short his life. But what had her poor boy done that he too should perish? She had heard only a few days since that simply because in his games the high-spirited lad had played at being general or emperor, Nero had given orders to his slaves to drown him by suddenly pushing him into the sea while he sat fishing on a rock. She knew that this crime had been committed, and his bright young life sacrificed simply because he shared her blood; and what maddened her most of all was that she dared make no complaint, dared not even to reveal that she was aware of the murder, because to allude to her first husband or her son was always to rouse Nero into a paroxysm of fury. In the brightest and most luxurious room of the Golden House she sat solitary, and sobbing as if her heart would break.

Then she thought of Otho. Dandy as he was, and debauchee, to her at least he had been passionately faithful. She had abandoned Crispinus to live with Otho partly from a certain fascination which hung about his wickedness, but even more from motives of ambition, and because he was Nero's most cherished favourite. She heard good accounts of his administration in Lusitania. Her intrigues to entangle