East, and surrounded by gardens which moved the envy of Nero,(26) the fallen statesman sought calm in penning his counsels to Lucilius, and bracing himself to meet the stealthy stroke which might be dealt at any moment.(27) In reading many passages of Seneca, you feel that you are sitting in some palace on the Esquiline, reading the _Phaedo_ or listening to the consolations of a Stoic director, while the centurion from the palace may at any moment appear with the last fateful order. Seneca, like Tacitus, has a remarkable power of moral diagnosis. He had acquired a profound, sad knowledge of the pathology of the soul. It was a power which was almost of necessity acquired in that time of terror and suspicion, when men lived in daily peril from seeming friends. There never was a period when men more needed the art of reading the secrets of character. Nor was there ever a time when there were greater facilities for the study. Life was sociable almost to excess. The Roman noble, unless he made himself deliberately a recluse, spent much of his time in those social meeting-places of which we hear so often,(28) where gossip and criticism dealt mercilessly with character, where keen wits were pitted against one another, sometimes in a deadly game, and where it might be a matter of life or death to pierce the armour of dissimulation.(29) Seneca had long shone in such circles. In his later years, if he became a recluse, he was also a spiritual director. And his Letters leave little doubt that many a restless or weary spirit laid bare its secret misery to him, for advice or consolation. Knowing well the wildest excesses of fantastic luxury, all the secrets of the philosophic confessional, the miseries of a position oscillating between almost princely state and monastic renunciation, the minister of Nero, with a self-imposed cure of souls, had unrivalled opportunities of ascertaining the moral condition of his class.