xxx PHYSICAL SCIENCE 



afflict the Just, The Constancy of the Sage, The Leisure of 

 the Sage. 



(b) Letters, or rather Treatises, of Condolence, the so- 

 called Consolations, addressed respectively to his Mother 

 Helvia ; to Marcia, the daughter of Cordus, on the death 

 of her son ; to Polybius, the powerful freedman of Claudius, 

 on the loss of his brother. 



(c) Letters to Lucilius, a hundred and twenty-four in 

 number. 



(d) Apocolocyntosis a lampoon on the deceased 

 Emperor Claudius. On such occasions deification (apothe- 

 osis) was accorded to the late ruler, and he was received 

 into the number of the gods. This skit describes the 

 reception of Claudius in heaven and his expulsion thence 

 to the lower regions, with his trial and sentence there. 

 Pumpkinification is the nearest English translation of the 

 title. 1 



(e) Quaestiones Naturales. 



(/) Works no longer extant, the only one of them 

 that concerns us being that on Earthquakes, referred to as 

 a work of his youth in Q.N. 230. 



(g) A spurious work, as is now on all hands conceded, 

 is the correspondence between Seneca and St. Paul. In 

 his opposition to popular beliefs and superstitions, and in 

 the purity of his moral tenets, Seneca approached some of 

 the Christian doctrines, and it was no improbable supposi- 

 tion that at the Court of Nero he might have became 

 acquainted with the Apostle of the Gentiles. 2 But the 

 assumption of a correspondence of this kind is another 

 affair. Its genuineness was believed from the time of 

 Jerome (400) till the sixteenth century. 



Seneca is generally considered to appear at his best 

 in the Consolation to his Mother Helvia and in the Epistles 

 to Lucilius, which are therefore usually ranked as amongst 

 his finest works. The latter work, which from the outset 



1 One would have expected that Claudius' fate would be to be enrolled 

 among the Pumpkins. But the piece as we have it contains no allusion to 

 this. 



2 See Mr. Henderson's Life and Principate of Nero, 286-7, and Mr. 

 Glover's The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire, 1 49. 



