Seneca was a good exemplar of the truth of a saying quoted by Xenophon in his Memorabilia of Socrates to the effect that even an upright man is sometimes good, sometimes bad. His writings convey the impression that their author is always under stress. The philosophical composure of which he has much to say, is an aspiration and a hope, not a fruition. When he speaks of the passions he sees them in their intensity. He seems to regard all men as either very good or very bad, and finds the latter class to include the great body of mankind. He fails to realize that the majority belong to neither extreme. The theater on which he saw the game of life played probably never had its counterpart in the world. He stands at one extreme and Plutarch at the other, just as the social circle in which each moved and knew best is the antipode of the other. Both looked too intently and exclusively upon the merely external. Though Plutarch judges the average man more correctly, neither possessed sufficient penetration of intellect to fathom all the passions that dominate or agitate the soul. Plutarch was most familiar with the man who is concerned with the ordinary affairs of life; Seneca knew best the corrupt crowd that sought to ingratiate itself into the favor of those who controlled the destinies of all about them, and, in a measure, of the entire world. Both were much in the public eye, but the public was a widely different one. Plutarch sought to make an impression by the arts of persuasion alone; Seneca, by all the arts that are within the power of a resourceful intellect. How much he was in the public eye is evident from the statement of Tacitus that his last words were written down and at once made public. His friends no less than his enemies desired this: his enemies, because they were eagerly watching for a final opportunity to prove that this famous preacher of an exalted philosophy would, after all, prove to be nothing more than a maker of fine phrases when the crucial test came; his friends, in order to furnish indubitable evidence that he had been true to his teachings to the end.