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We did not think so in England in the fifties, the sixties, and the seventies, in the heyday of Victorian romance; and I do not think we ought to pass that judgment now in this last quinquennium of our century.
Although a constitution promulgated in 1881 fixed the chief magistrate's term of office at two years, the success which Guzman Blanco had attained enabled him to control affairs for five years the Quinquennium, as it was called. Thereupon he procured his appointment to a diplomatic post in Europe; but the popular demand for his presence was too strong for him to remain away.
The mild and enlightened administration of the earlier years of the new reign, the famous quinquennium Neronis, which was looked back to afterwards as a sort of brief golden age, may indeed be ascribed largely to Seneca's influence; but this influence was based on an excessive indulgence of Nero's caprices, which soon worked out its own punishment.
For the first five years of Nero's reign the famous Quinquennium Neronis were fondly regarded by the Romans as a period of almost ideal happiness. In reality, it was Seneca who was ruling in Nero's, name. Even so excellent an Emperor as Trajan is said to have admitted "that no other prince had nearly equalled the praise of that period."
Imagine some Jewish Pharisee, a Nicodemus or a Gamaliel pronouncing an eulogy on the tenderness of a Herod, and you have some picture of the appearance which Seneca's consistency must have worn in the eyes of his contemporaries. This event took place A.D. 55, in the first year of Nero's Quinquennium, and the same year was nearly signalized by the death of his mother.
Thus in 1909, at the close of a quinquennium of military re-equipment, which had raised her annual army budget from £27,000,000 to £41,000,000, Germany countenanced the Austrian annexation of Bosnia and the Herzegovina, and plainly told the authorities at St. Petersburg that any military action against Austria would bring Russia into a state of war with Germany.
The little neighbouring island of Cossyra, between Sicily and Carthage, also shows upon its coins clear traces of its taste for Egyptian customs. The first five years of this reign, the quinquennium Neronis, while the emperor was under the tutorship of the philosopher Seneca, became in Rome proverbial for good government, and on the coinage we see marks of Egypt being equally well treated.
Then there came to Rome the famed Quinquennium Neronis, when, for five years, peace and plenty smiled. It is a trite saying that men who can not manage their own finances can look after those of a nation, but Seneca was a businessman who proved his ability to manage his own private affairs and also succeeded in managing the exchequer of a kingdom.
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