Advanced age and his extremely meagre diet had left little blood in Seneca’s veins, and it flowed with painful slowness. His tortures were excessive and, to avoid the intolerable grief of being witnesses of each other’s suffering, they shut themselves up in separate apartments. With that marvellous intrepid tranquillity which characterised some of the old sages, Seneca calmly dictated his last thoughts to his surrounding friends. These were afterwards published. His agonies being still prolonged, he took hemlock; and this also failing, he was carried into a vapour-stove, where he was suffocated, and thus at length ceased to suffer. In estimating the character of Seneca, it is just that we should consider all the circumstances of the exceptional time in which his life was cast. Perhaps there has never been an age or people more utterly corrupt and abandoned than that of the period of the earlier Roman Cæsars and that of Rome and the large cities of the empire. Allowing the utmost that his detractors have brought against him, the moral character of the author of the _Consolations_ and _Letters_ stands out in bright relief as compared with that of the immense majority of his contemporaries of equal rank and position, who were sunk in the depths of licentiousness and of selfish indifference to the miseries of the surrounding world. That his public career was not of so exalted a character altogether as are his moral precepts, is only too patent to be denied and, in this shortcoming of a loftier _ideal_, he must share reproach with some of the most esteemed of the world’s luminaries. If, for instance, we compare him with Cicero or with Francis Bacon, the comparison would certainly be not unfavourable to Seneca. The darkest stigma on the reputation of the great Latin moralist is his connivance at the death of the infamous Agrippina, the mother of his pupil Nero. Although not to be excused, we may fairly attribute this act to conscientious, if mistaken, motives. His best apology is to be found in the fact that, so long as he assisted to direct the counsels of Nero, he contrived to restrain that prince’s depraved disposition from those outbreaks which, after the death of the philosopher, have stigmatised the name of Nero with undying infamy. The principal writings of Seneca are:-- 1. _On Anger._ His earliest, and perhaps his best known, work. 2. _On Consolation._ Addressed to his mother, Helvia. An admirable philosophical exhortation. 3. _On Providence; or, Why evils happen to good men though a divine Providence may exist._ 4. _On Tranquillity of Mind._ 5. _On Clemency._ Addressed to Nero Cæsar. One of the most meritorious writings of all antiquity. It is not unworthy of being classed with the humanitarian protests of Beccaria and Voltaire. The stoical distinction between clemency and pity (_misericordia_), in book ii., is, as Seneca admits, merely a dispute about words.