[1] Lucan, owing to the jealousy of Nero, was induced to join Piso’s conspiracy in 65 and suffered the penalty. His heroic poem, the _Pharsalia_, though in many respects crude, is a wonderful production for a man of twenty-six. The eldest brother of the Senecan family, Novatus, was adopted by a friend of the family, Junius Gallio, by whose name he is known to history. Seneca on more than one occasion makes reference to him in the _Q.N._, and always in the most laudatory terms. In iv. Pref. 9 _et sqq._, he pays a high tribute to his character, and a further proof of his admiration and affection is afforded by his addressing to him his treatise on _A Happy Life_. Gallio is of interest in another connection. He was proconsul of Achaia during the period of the Apostle Paul’s activity there (Acts xviii.), and his conduct on the occasion of a sectarian uproar at Corinth has attached to his name a certain stigma which, perhaps, he does not altogether deserve. Seneca was born about the beginning of the Christian era, probably in the year 3. By this time the language and the arts of Rome had spread widely over the conquered provinces, in many of which independent centres of culture and literary activity had sprung up. While Rome as the capital and heart of things continued to draw to herself all that was best, or, at any rate, all that was most enterprising and ambitious, her literary and even her political life was largely recruited and maintained by supplies from external sources, such as Spain, Gaul, and Africa.[2] [2] From Spain, besides the Senecas, Lucan and Martial, already mentioned, came Columella, Pomponius Mela, Quintilian, etc.; from Gaul came many rhetoricians; Africa sent so many of the same class that by Juvenal’s time (_circ._ 100) it could with propriety be designated “nursery of lawyers” (see Teuffel, _Hist. of Rom. Lit._ vol. ii. 6).