Greece were carried off by the votary of Greek art; the gold and silver images of her shrines were sent to the melting-pot.(107) Ungrateful testators paid their due penalty after death; and delation, watching every word or gesture, skilfully supplied the needed tale of victims for plunder. It is all a hackneyed story. Yet it is perhaps necessary to revive it once more to explain the suppressed terror and lingering agony of the last days of Seneca. The impressions of the Terror which we receive from Seneca are powerful and almost oppressive. A thick atmosphere of gloom and foreboding seems to stifle us as we turn his pages. But Seneca deals rather in shadowy hint and veiled suggestion than in definite statement. For the minute picture of that awful scene of degradation we must turn to Tacitus. He wrote in the fresh dawn of an age of fancied freedom, when the gloom of the tyranny seemed to have suddenly vanished like an evil dream. Yet he cannot shake off the sense of horror and disgust which fifteen years of ignoble compliance or silent suffering have burnt into his soul. Even under the manly, tolerant rule of Trajan, he hardly seems to have regained his breath.(108) He can scarcely believe that the light has come at last. His attitude to the tyranny is essentially different from that of Seneca. The son of the provincial from Cordova views the scene rather as the cosmopolitan moralist, imperilled by his huge fortune and the neighbourhood of the terrible palace. Tacitus looks at it as the Roman Senator, steeped in all old Roman tradition, caring little for philosophy, but caring intensely for old Roman dignity and the prestige of that great order, which he had seen humbled and decimated.(109) The feeling of Seneca is that of a Stoic monk, isolated in a corner of his vast palace, now trembling before the imperial jealousy, which his wealth and celebrity may draw down upon him, and again seeking consolation in thoughts of God and eternity which might often seem to belong to Thomas à Kempis. The tone of Tacitus is sometimes that of a man who should have lived in the age of the Samnite or the Carthaginian wars, before luxury and factious ambition had sapped the moral strength of the great aristocratic caste, while his feelings are divided between grim anger at a cruel destiny, and scornful regret for the weakness and the self-abandonment of a class which had been once so great. The feelings of Seneca express themselves rather in rhetorical self-pity. The feelings of Tacitus find vent in words which sometimes veil a pathos too proud for effusive utterance, sometimes cut like lancet points, and which, in their concentrated moral scorn, have left an eternal brand of infamy on names of historic renown.