In reading Seneca’s writings, especially those of his last years, you are conscious of a horror which hardly ever takes definite shape, a thick stifling air, as it were, charged with lightning. Again and again, you feel a dim terror closing in silently and stealthily, with sudden glimpses of unutterable torture, of cord and rack and flaming tunic.(52) You seem to see the sage tossing on his couch of purple under richly panelled ceilings of gold, starting at every sound in the wainscot,(53) as he awaits the messenger of death. It is not so much that Seneca fears death itself, although we may suspect that his nerves sometimes gave the lie to his principles. He often hails death as welcome at any age, as the deliverer who strikes off the chain and opens the prison door, the one harbour on a tempestuous and treacherous sea.(54) He is grateful for having always open this escape from life’s long torture, and boldly claims the right to anticipate the executioner. The gloom of Seneca seems rather to spring from a sense of the terrible contrast between wealth and state and an ignominious doom which was ever ready to fall. And to his fevered eye all stately rank seems at last but a precipice overhanging the abyss, a mark for treacherous envy or the spitefulness of Fortune.(55) “A great fortune is a great servitude,”(56) which, if it has been hard to win, is harder still to guard. And all life is full of these pathetic contrasts. Pleasure is nearest neighbour to pain; the summer sea in a moment is boiling in the tempest; the labour of long years is scattered in a day; there is always terror lurking under our deepest peace. And so we reach the sad gospel of a universal pessimism; “nothing is so deceitful and treacherous as the life of man.”(57) No one would knowingly accept such a fatal gift, of which the best that can be said is that the torture is short, that our first moment of existence is the first stage to the grave.(58) Thus to Seneca, with all his theoretical indifference to things external to the virtuous will, with all his admiration for the invulnerable wisdom, withdrawn in the inner citadel of the soul, and defying the worst that tyrants or fortune could inflict, the _taedium vitae_ became almost unendurable. The interest of all this lies, not in Seneca’s inconsistency, but in the nightmare which brooded on such minds in the reign of Nero.