Nero’s other victim, the curious compound between Polonius and Mr Pecksniff (with, it must be owned, some merits which [Sidenote: _Seneca the Younger._] belonged to neither), whose name was L. Annæus Seneca, has left us a great deal more work than Petronius, and was certainly a man of letters. He was even a considerable man of letters, and if he wrote the _Tragedies_, a very considerable man of letters indeed.[311] He had, moreover, though scarcely a good, a distinct and by no means commonplace style, and while Quintilian attacks him _nominatim_ in a passage which will occupy us later, it is by no means improbable that Petronius (who must have known him well, and was probably bored by him) had Seneca himself in his mind when he talked of the _ventosa et enormis loquacitas_. Footnote 311: _Works_, 3 vols., ed. Haase, Leipsic, 1886-87. This does not contain the _Tragedies_, as to which, however, I have never wished to go beyond a nearly forty years’ possession, the pretty little “Regent’s Classics” edition of 1823. But I have never, as a critic, been able to believe that Seneca wrote them. Seneca, however, was by profession a Stoic, and these classical Pharisees, though their sect was not exactly unliterary, pushed to an extreme the partly superfine, partly puritanic, contempt with which, as we have seen, the philosophy of antiquity generally chose to regard the minutiæ of literary criticism and literary craft. The “wise man of the Stoics” might be a perfect man of letters, as he was a perfect everything else; but it was entirely beneath him to take seriously such things as metre, or style, or the pleasure of literary art. In the Tenth Dialogue, _de Brevitate Vitæ_,[312] after the philosopher has been talking in his high-sniffing way of collecting brasses, singing, giving long and _recherché_ dinners (but not, so far as I remember, of putting out money at usury), he begins a new chapter with things to be treated more contemptuously still. Footnote 312: Ed. cit., i. 209. If Seneca be suspected of possible insincerity, Marcus Aurelius cannot be. Yet the estimable Emperor, who had earlier (i. 7), in the true Pharisaic spirit, congratulated himself on abstaining from “rhetoric and poetry,” concludes his reference to the drama (xi. 6) (a reference interesting as including one of the explanations of κάθαρσις), by asking, “To what end does the whole plan of poetry and drama look?” As for Epictetus, _v. supra_, p. 62.