INTRODUCTION 



professed tenets of the simple life endeavoured to avoid a 

 repetition of the risk at least of poison. His diet was 

 herbs, his drink, water from the fountain. But it was 

 only a matter of time now. The occasion for which the 

 Emperor was on the watch came in 65. In that year 

 Piso's conspiracy was formed against the Emperor's life, 

 and Seneca was accused, falsely so far as we can judge, 

 of complicity. He was ordered to prepare for death, 

 which, according to the custom of the day, allowed the 

 victim the choice of means, and was usually a voluntary 

 opening of the veins in order to bleed to death. Tacitus 

 has with characteristic power and pathos depicted the 

 scene (Annals^ xv. 61-4^). No act of his life, it would 

 seem, became Seneca better than the leaving of it 

 His death was worthy of a philosopher and a Stoic. 

 With the utmost calmness, amid a throng of mourning, 

 sympathising friends, he faced his fate, and yet with 

 the studied pose of a man who had conned the part. 

 The age was one of posturing. Men were always under 

 the eye of the informer and the spy, and learnt to act 

 their part accordingly. The " meditation of death " must 

 often have occupied the philosopher's latter days. He was 

 a second Socrates consigned to an unjust end ; the last 

 scene was enacted with all the dignity, composure, and 

 even cheerfulness of his great prototype. The cock due 

 to Aesculapius has a parallel more worthy of the occasion 

 in the libation to Jupiter the Liberator. The supreme act 

 atoned for many weaknesses and failures. 



Though Seneca was not without many detractors, 1 his 

 worth as a man is attested by many proofs. His young 

 wife Paulina desired to share his fate, and opened her 

 veins along with her husband. By Nero's orders she 

 was saved, but she continued to the end of her life to 

 bear in her unnatural pallor the marks of her devotion. 

 Tacitus, writing at a distance of thirty or forty years, 

 describes the character of Seneca in terms of commendation 

 and esteem. No doubt the historian had himself borne 



1 Dio Cassius is often very caustic in his criticisms, but even he recognises 

 Seneca's sterling merit and services to the state. 



