"Seneca is dead;" was the news they brought him. Then, in one of the libraries, he learned the details. Rufus had been a friend of Seneca, and the story had come direct to him. The three friends were strangely moved. Marcus and Serenus listened in silence as Rufus described the scene at the villa. "He asked for his will, that he might make some bequests to his friends; but this was forbidden. Turning then, to his wife and the two friends who were dining with him, he said that since Nero had murdered his mother and brother it was not to be expected that he might spare the instructor of his youth. Paulina desired to die with him, and the physician opened the veins of both. But Seneca's blood would not flow, and he drank poison; finally, he was carried to a warm bath, and died. Paulina's wounds were bound up, by command of Nero, and she still lives." "She is more to be pitied," said Serenus. "What others died?" Rufus gave their names. "Lucan, too!" exclaimed Serenus. "Does Gallio still live?" "I have not heard of his death; but it is impossible that he would escape." "Yes," said Serenus; "Seneca's family is annihilated. It is like the working of Nemesis. We have been the spectators of one of Fate's tragedies, which are so rare. It is complete, large, full of irony; and Seneca's own words, 'the murderer of his mother and brother would not spare the instructor of his youth!' One thinks of them less as Seneca's own words, than as the sardonic comment of a later historian. They are too apt." "You were not one of Seneca's friends," said Rufus. "No," said Serenus; "Nero is the direct result of Seneca's teachings. So brutal a voluptuary could hardly issue from any but a Stoic school. It is at once raw, crude, and narrow; it coarsens our natural appetites instead of refining them. For Stoicism the human emotions, love and pity, are but weaknesses, which it denies and attempts to stifle. It is very far from the secret of human sympathy. Nero as a young man had many excellent qualities, which an artistic and delicate training might have developed into fine accomplishments: he might have learned the art of life; and instead he has learned only rhetoric, the sort of rhetoric that vitiates every action, and makes our emotions the subject for a stage declamation, makes life a mere piece of acting. Yet I must not forget, Rufus, that Seneca was your friend. Perhaps he was better than his philosophy; but I have never been able to forgive him either for his adulation of Claudius during his life, or his satire upon him after his death." "Seneca was un-Roman," said Marcus. "Why do you say that?" enquired Serenus. "All his ideals were un-Roman," answered Marcus. "His notions of the brotherhood and natural equality of man, his unpractical nature and sentimentalism, his absolute lack of a grasp upon realities and their significance, his condemnation of war and of slavery. His life was composed almost entirely of noble maxims, and of trivial actions."