“‘From whence such a hunger in man after unnatural and unlawful food? Do you dare, O mortal race, to continue to feed on flesh? Do it not, I beseech you, and give heed to my admonitions. And when you present to your palates the limbs of slaughtered oxen, know and feel that you are feeding on the tillers of the ground.’”--_Metam._ xv., 73-142. V. SENECA. DIED 65 A.D. Lucius Annæus Seneca, the greatest name in the stoic school of philosophy, and the first of Latin moralists, was born at Corduba (Cordova) almost contemporaneously with the beginning of the Christian era. His family, like that of Ovid, was of the equestrian order. He was of a weakly constitution; and bodily feebleness, as with many other great intellects, served to intensify if not originate, the activity of the mind. At Rome, with which he early made acquaintance, he soon gained great distinction at the bar; and the eloquence and fervour he displayed in the Senate before the Emperor Caligula excited the jealous hatred of that insane tyrant. Later in life he obtained a prætorship, and he was also appointed to the tutorship of the young Domitius, afterwards the Emperor Nero. On the accession of that prince, at the age of seventeen, to the imperial throne, Seneca became one of his chief advisers. Unfortunately for his credit as a philosopher, while exerting his influence to restrain the vicious propensities of his old pupil, he seems to have been too anxious to acquire, not only a fair proportion of wealth, but even an enormous fortune, and his villas and gardens were of so splendid a kind as to provoke the jealousy and covetousness of Nero. This, added to his alleged disparagement of the prince’s talents, especially in singing and driving, for which Nero particularly desired to be famous, was the cause of his subsequent disgrace and death. The philosopher prudently attempted to anticipate the will of Nero by a voluntary surrender of all his accumulated possessions, and he sought to disarm the jealous suspicions of the tyrant by a retired and unostentatious life. These precautions were of no avail; his death was already decided. He was accused of complicity in the conspiracy of Piso, and the only grace allowed him was to be his own executioner. The despair of his wife, Pompeia Paulina, he attempted to mitigate by the reflection that his life had been always directed by the standard of a higher morality. Nothing, however, could dissuade her from sharing her husband’s fate, and the two faithful friends laid open their veins by the same blow.