+---------------------+ | D . M | | M. ANNÆO | | PAULO . PETRO | | M. ANNÆUS . PAULUS | | FILIO . CARISSIMO | +---------------------+ make it altogether probable that both these apostles had been held in great honor by this particular household, and that a suggestion of a friendship with Christians is not wholly arbitrary. Seneca was one of the greatest of the Stoics. “The Stoical philosophy,” says Frederick Farrar, “may be compared to a torch, which flings a faint gleam here and there in the dusky recesses of a mighty cavern, while Christianity may be compared to the sun, pouring into the inmost depths of the same cavern its sevenfold illumination. The torch had a value and a brightness of its own; but, compared to the dawning of that new glory, it appears to be dim and ineffectual, even though its brightness was a real brightness and had been drawn from the same ethereal source.” Concerning the close of life, Seneca wrote to Lucilius: I am preparing myself for that day on which, laying aside all artifice or subterfuge, I shall be able to judge respecting myself whether I really speak or merely feel as a brave man should: whether all these words of haughty obstinacy which I have hurled against fortune were mere pretense and pantomime. What you have really achieved will then be manifest when your end is near. Alas! the trouble with Seneca was that which puts all the great moral philosophers so far below Christ and even his apostles, namely, that he so failed to live up to the precepts that he wrote. It was when he descended from the plane of theory and sentiment to that of practice in daily life that he often ignobly failed. No complete biography of him has come down to us. The curtain rises and falls over separated scenes in his life. But we know enough to mark his strange inconsistencies. His temporizing management of his imperial pupil, his accumulation of great wealth while he was extolling poverty, his mingling among the extravagancies and corruptions of the imperial court, his apparent failure to express any condemnation of the murders of Britannicus and Agrippina, and his apology for the latter of these horrors, which he wrote for Nero, are enough to be mentioned. It must be admitted that he had a very hard place to fill as an adviser of the emperor, and was often, doubtless, sorely perplexed to know what course of action would be best for the public welfare, but he cannot be acquitted of consent to some of Nero’s crimes. It was from the Roman army at last that retribution came to the cruel tyrant. He had become uneasy at the murmurs and the gloom that had manifestly increased among the people at his capital. He went for relief to his rural resorts in Campania. Reports of discontent there came to him from the provinces. The army camps contained many who were brooding over wrongs he had done them and were waiting for their revenge.