330 PHYSICAL SCIENCE 



the subject in the succeeding and final chapters, and after enume- 

 rating the different agencies that may be called out to effect the 

 destruction of the world, he draws a lurid scene when a single 

 day will see the burial of the whole human race. 1 After this 

 act of divine wrath has been accomplished, the waters will 

 disappear below ground, the sea will retire to its own abode, and 

 on the renovated earth every animal will be created afresh, and a 

 new race of men will be installed, ignorant of sin and born under 

 better auspices. 



BOOK IV 



This section of the treatise begins with a denunciation of 

 flattery and ends with another against luxury. Neither the 

 preface nor the concluding chapter have any obvious connection 

 with the text between them. It is curious to note that while 

 Seneca here warns his friend Lucilius against flatterers, and in- 

 culcates how their approaches are to be met, he himself in this 

 very volume perpetrates four pieces of flattery to the despicable 

 but all-powerful Nero. He quotes a prosaic line from a poem of 

 the emperor's, which he characterises as "most elegant" (dis- 

 ertissime, 25). He refers to Nero as most devoted to truth as 

 well as to the other virtues (235); he refers to the advent of a 

 comet which appearing in Nero's reign had redeemed these 

 heavenly bodies from their evil repute (290), and he describes 

 that reign as "most joyous " (laetissimus, 294). The old courtier, 

 so long habituated to the language of flattery, was perhaps hardly 

 conscious that he was here making use of it, or he may naturally 

 have reflected that at a time when the emperor had ceased to 

 bear him any good will, the absence of the customary adulation 

 might cause as much offence as if a direct insult were intended. 



When from his ethical lecture he turns to resume his physical 

 disquisitions, it is the mysterious Nile to which he devotes atten- 

 tion. After a brief contradiction of the statement of some 

 philosophers that the Nile and the Danube are similar in their 

 characters, he enumerates some of the well-known peculiarities 

 of the river of Egypt. A problem which greatly exercised the 

 minds of the philosophers of antiquity, and which has only been 

 finally solved in our own day, was the cause of the annual rise 

 of the Nile on which the fertility of Egypt depended. Seneca 



1 So Lucretius : 



. . . maria ac terras caelumque 

 una dies dabit exitio. 



De Rer. Nat. v. 92, 94. 



