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Updated: May 2, 2025
The fact is that at this time and for centuries afterwards the Romans regarded the Christians with such lordly indifference that like Festus, and Felix and Seneca's brother Gallio they never took the trouble to distinguish them from the Jews.
At the age of twenty-three he wrote his first book, a commentary on Seneca's "Treatise on Clemency." At twenty-five he revised a translation of the French Bible. At twenty-seven he published the first edition of his mighty work, "The Institution of the Christian Religion," a treatise which has been styled "one of the landmarks of the history of Christian doctrine."
We do not intend to defend the character of the man; if style be the true reflex of the soul, as in all great writers without doubt it is, we allow that Seneca's style shows a mind wanting in gravity, that is, in the highest Roman excellence. His is the bright enthusiasm of display, not the steady one of duty; but though it be lower it need not be less real.
The rhetorical manner was so essentially part of Seneca's nature, that the warm colouring and perpetual mannerism of his language does not imply any insincerity or want of earnestness. In spite of the laboured style, there is no failure either in lucidity or in force, and even where the rhetoric is most profuse, it seldom is without a solid basis of thought.
In the spring of the year 61, not long after the time when the murder of Agrippina, and Seneca's justifications of it, had been absorbing the attention of the Roman world, there disembarked at Puteoli a troop of prisoners, whom the Procurator of Judaea had sent to Rome under the charge of a centurion.
But Nero feared Seneca might expose his worthlessness and the philosopher himself take the reins. In this Nero did not know his man: Seneca's love was literary political power to him was transient and not worth while.
Three weeks after Anne Boleyn's death and the king's third marriage, the chancellor dared to address the English legislature in these terms: and either he spoke like a reasonable man, which he may have done, or else he was making an exhibition of effrontery to be paralleled only by Seneca's letter to the Roman Senate after the murder of Agrippina.
This tragedy runs in verses of fourteen syllables, and for the most part his chorus is writ in verse of ten syllables, which is called heroic. Thyestes, another tragedy of Seneca's, which in the judgment of Hiensius, is not inferior to any other of his dramatic pieces.
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.
Of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius we shall have very little to say by way of summary, for they show no inconsistencies and very few of the imperfections which characterise Seneca's ideal of the Stoic philosophy. The "moral peddling," the pedagogic display, the puerile ostentation, the antithetic brilliancy, which we have had to point out in Seneca, are wanting in them.
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