We need not repeat the conversation which took place between the friendly ministers, but it was long and troubled. Burrus felt, no less strongly than Seneca, that affairs at Court were daily assuming a more awkward complexion. The mass of the populace, and of the nobles, rejoicing in the general tranquillity, were happily ignorant of facts which filled with foreboding the hearts of the two statesmen. The nobles and the people praised with rapture the speech which Nero had pronounced before the Senate after the funeral honours had been paid to the murdered Claudius. ‘I have,’ he said, ‘no wrongs to avenge; no ill feeling towards a single human being. I will maintain the purity and independence of legal trials. In the Palace there shall be no bribery and no intrigues. I will command the army, but in no particular will I encroach upon the prerogatives of the Conscript Fathers.’ Critics recognised in the speech the style and sentiments of Seneca, but that only showed that at last philosophy was at the helm of state. And the Fathers had really been allowed to enact some beneficent and useful measures. It was the beginning of a period of government of which the public and external beneficence was due to Seneca and the Prætorian Præfect, who acted together in perfect harmony, and with whom Nero was too indolent to interfere. Long afterwards, so great a ruler as Trajan said that he would emulate, but could not hope to equal, the fame of Nero’s golden _quinquennium_. But, meanwhile, unknown to the Roman world in general, the ‘golden quinquennium’ was early stained with infamy and blood; and the contemporary Pliny says that _all through his reign_ Nero was an enemy of the human race.[9]