He was thrown largely upon himself and his own resources. If Titus happened to be absent; if Epaphroditus did not chance to bring with him the quaint boy Epictetus; if the duties of Pudens summoned him elsewhere, he had few with whom he could converse in his own apartments. Sometimes Burrus visited him, and was kind; but he could hardly forgive Burrus for his share in Agrippina’s plot. Seneca occasionally came to see him, and Seneca felt a genuine wish to alleviate the boy’s unhappy lot. But Seneca had been Nero’s supporter, and Britannicus could not quite get over the misgiving that his fine sentences were insincere. And at last an incident occurred which made it impossible for him ever to speak to Seneca without dislike. One day Nero had sent for his brother, and Britannicus, entering the Emperor’s room before he came in, saw a copy of[*6] the _Ludus de morte Claudii Cæsaris_ lying on the table. Naturally enough he had not heard of this ferocious satire upon his unhappy father. Attracted by the oddness of the title ‘_Apokolokyntosis_,’ which the librarian had written on the outer case, he took up the book, and had read the first few columns when Nero entered. As he read, his soul burned with inexpressible indignation. His father had received a sumptuous Cæsarean funeral; he had been deified by the decree of the Senate; a grand temple had been reared in his honour on the Cœlian hill; priests and priestesses had been appointed to worship his divinity. He knew very well that this might be regarded as a conventional officialism; but that the writer of this book should thus openly laugh in the face of Rome, her religion, and her Empire; that he should class Claudius with two miserable idiots like Augurinus and Baba; that he should brutally ridicule his absence of mind, his slavering lips, his ungainly aspect, and represent the Olympian deities in consultation as to whether he was a god, a human being, or a sea-monster--this seemed to him an act of shameless hypocrisy. He had seen how the Romans prostrated themselves in the dust before his father in his lifetime, as it were to lick his sandals; how Seneca himself had blazoned his earthly godship in paragraphs of sonorous eloquence. Yet here, on the table of his successor and adopted son, was a satire replete in every line with enormous slanders. And who could have written it? Britannicus could think of no one but Seneca; and all the more since the marks on the manuscript showed that Nero had read it, and read it with amused appreciation.