He was sitting in his study one afternoon, and the low wind sounded mournfully through the trees outside. It was a room of fine proportions, and the shelves were crowded with choice books. There were rolls of vellum or papyrus, stained saffron-colour at the back, and fastened to sticks of ebony, of which the bosses were gilded. All the most valuable were enclosed in cases of purple parchment, with their titles attached to them in letters of vermilion. There was scarcely a book there which did not represent the best art of the famous booksellers, the Sosii, in the Vicus Sandalarius, whose firm was as old as the days of Horace. A glance at the library showed the taste as well as the wealth of the eminent owner--the ablest, the richest, the most popular, the most powerful of the Roman senators. They who thought his lot so enviable little knew that his pomp and power brought him nothing except an almost sleepless anxiety. Every visitor who came to him that morning spoke of subjects which either tortured him with misgivings or vexed him with a touch of shame. The first to visit Seneca that day was his brother Gallio, with whom he enjoyed a long, confidential, and interesting conversation. Gallio, to whom every one gave the epithet of ‘sweet’ and ‘charming,’ and of whom Seneca said that those who loved him to the utmost did not love him enough, had recently returned from the proconsulship of Achaia. He had just been nominated Consul as a reward for his services. The brothers had much to tell each other. Gallio described some of his experiences, and made Seneca laugh by a story of how a Jewish Rabbi had been dragged before his tribunal by the Jews of Corinth, who were infuriated with him because he had joined this new, strange, and execrable sect of Christians. This Jew’s name was Paulus, and his countrymen accused him of worshipping a malefactor who, for some sedition or other--but probably only to please the turbulent Jews--had been crucified, in the reign of Tiberius, by the Procurator Pontius Pilatus. ‘I naturally refused to have anything to do with their abject superstition,’ said Gallio. ‘Abject enough,’ answered Seneca; ‘but is our mythology much better?’ Gallio answered with a shrug of the shoulders. ‘They are the gods of the mob,’ he said, ‘not ours; and they are useful to the magistrates.’ ‘A new god has recently been added to their number,’ said Seneca, ‘the divine Claudius.’