When Seneca was still a babe only two years old the family migrated to Rome. He had two brothers,--Marcus Annæus Novatus and Lucius Annæus Mela. The latter was the father of Lucan, the poet of Rome’s declining literature. The former is known in history as Julius Gallio, a name which he took when adopted by an orator of that name. It was the same Gallio who became deputy of Achaia in Greece and before whom the Apostle Paul was dragged at Corinth by the Jews, who were indignant at his success in preaching. When some Greeks seized Sosthenes, the ruler of the synagogue, and beat him before the judgment seat, Gallio “cared for none of those things.” How little he dreamed that the one thing that would keep his name before the ages would be the fact that a Christian Jew, obscure at that time, was brought for a few moments before his tribunal! But he was popular in his day for his culture and refinement and was called _dulcis Gallio_,--the sweet Gallio. Seneca had the best educational advantages of his times. He studied rhetoric and philosophy. From Sotion, a Pythagorean, he imbibed the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, and from Attalus, the Stoic, a hatred of “vice, of error, and of the ills of life.” He learned in theory to commend poverty, to despise luxury, and to declare that the mind should be superior to its surroundings. He was too far from Palestine to have been brought in contact with the ministry there of Christ and of his apostles, but it is striking to remember (and here we may quote the language of Dean Farrar) that “amid all the guilty and stormy scenes in which his earlier destiny was cast there lived and taught in Palestine the Son of God, the Saviour of the World.” While the young Seneca was being guarded by his attendant slave through the crowded and dangerous streets of Rome on his way to school, Saint Peter and Saint Andrew were fisher lads by the shore of Lake Gennesareth; while Seneca was ardently assimilating the doctrine of Attalus, Saint Paul with no less fervency of soul sat learning at the feet of the Rabbi Gamaliel in Jerusalem, and long before Seneca had made his way through paths dizzy and dubious to the zenith of his fame, the Saviour of men, unknown to him, had been cruelly crucified. Seneca’s writings during the life of Tiberius were chiefly on subjects drawn from nature and on India and Egypt,--countries in which he had been traveling. He won a high reputation in literature. He had little to do with the imperial court. He was not brought into any personal relation with the emperor Tiberius, but not infrequently in his pages refers to that “brutal monster” and to the dangerous power of his prime minister, Sejanus. We shall hear more of Seneca farther on.