It was probably during this period that Seneca laid the foundations of that enormous fortune which excited the hatred and ridicule of his opponents. There is every reason to believe that this fortune was honourably gained. As both his father and mother were wealthy, he had doubtless inherited an ample competency; this was increased by the lucrative profession of a successful advocate, and was finally swollen by the princely donations of his pupil Nero. It is not improbable that Seneca, like Cicero, and like all the wealthy men of their day, increased his property by lending money upon interest. No disgrace attached to such a course; and as there is no proof for the charges of Dio Cassius on this head, we may pass them over with silent contempt. Dio gravely informs us that Seneca excited an insurrection in Britain, by suddenly calling in the enormous sum of 40,000,000 sesterces; but this is in all probability the calumny of a professed enemy. We shall refer again to Seneca's wealth; but we may here admit that it was undoubtedly ungraceful and incongruous in a philosopher who was perpetually dwelling on the praises of poverty, and that even in his own age it attracted unfavourable notice, as we may see from the epithet _Proedives_, "the over-wealthy," which is applied to him alike by a satiric poet and by a grave historian. Seneca was perfectly well aware that this objection could be urged against him, and it must be admitted that the grounds on which he defends himself in his treatise _On a Happy Life_ are not very conclusive or satisfactory. The boyhood of Seneca fell in the last years of the Emperor Augustus, when, in spite of the general decorum and amiability of their ruler, people began to see clearly that nothing was left of liberty except the name. His youth and early manhood were spent during those three-and-twenty years of the reign of Tiberius, that reign of terror, during which the Roman world was reduced to a frightful silence and torpor as of death;[22] and, although he was not thrown into personal collision with that "brutal monster," he not unfrequently alludes to him, and to the dangerous power and headlong ruin of his wicked minister Sejanus. Up to this time he had not experienced in his own person those crimes and horrors which fall to the lot of men who are brought into close contact with tyrants. This first happened to him in the reign of Caius Caesar, of whom we are enabled, from the writings of Seneca alone, to draw a full-length portrait. [Footnote 22: Milton, _Paradise Regained_, iv. 128. For a picture of Tiberius as he appeared in his old age at Capreae, "hated of all and hating," see Id. 90-97.]