“Moved by these and similar arguments, I resolved to abstain from flesh meat, and at the end of a year the habit of abstinence was not only easy but delightful. I firmly believed that the faculties of my mind were more active,[25] and at this day I will not take pains to assure you whether they were so or not. You ask, then, ‘Why did you go back and relinquish this mode of life?’ I reply that the lot of my early days was cast in the reign of the emperor Tiberius. Certain foreign religions became the object of the imperial suspicion, and amongst the proofs of adherence to the foreign cultus or superstition was that of abstinence from the flesh of animals. At the entreaties of my father, therefore, who had no real fear of the practice being made a ground of accusation, but who had a hatred of philosophy,[26] I was induced to return to my former dietetic habits, nor had he much difficulty in persuading me to recur to more sumptuous repasts.... “This I tell,” he proceeds, “to prove to you how powerful are the early impetuses of youth to what is truest and best under the exhortations and incentives of virtuous teachers. We err partly through the fault of our guides, who teach us _how to dispute_, not _how to live_; partly by our own fault in expecting our teachers to cultivate not so much the _disposition of the mind_ as the faculties of the intellect. Hence it is that in place of a love of wisdom there is only a love of words (Itaque quæ _philosophia_ fuit, facta _philologia_ est).”--_Epistola_ cviii.[27] Seneca here cautiously reveals the jealous suspicion with which the first Cæsars viewed all foreign, and especially quasi-religious, innovations, and his own _public_ compliance, to some extent, with the orthodox dietetic practices. Yet that in private life he continued to practise, as well as to preach, a radical dietary reformation is sufficiently evident to all who are conversant with his various writings. The refinement and gentleness of his ethics are everywhere apparent, and exhibit him as a man of extraordinary sensibility and feeling. As for _dietetics_, he makes it a matter of the first importance, on which he is never weary of insisting. “_We must so live, not as if we ought to live for, but as though we could not do without, the body._” He quotes Epikurus: “_If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if according to conventionalism, you will never be rich. Nature demands little; fashion_ (opinio) _superfluity_.” In one of his letters he eloquently describes the riotous feasting of the period which corresponds to our festival of Christmas--another illustration of the proverb, “History repeats itself”:--