Between Heathenism and Christianity - College of Stoic Philosophers

Seneca: His Character and Environment
He was less vain, less hungry for public honors
and applause, and attached less importance to mere
outward display. As a thinker Seneca has more
originality than Cicero, is less dependent upon books,
knows better the motives that underlie human con
duct. Both were essentially Roman in their views
of life, and it is only by keeping this in rnind that we
are able to explain, if not to excuse, the lack of har
mony between what they said and what they did;
between what they preached and what they practised.
Like that of Cicero, Seneca s was no adamantine
soul, no unyielding barrier against which the vices
of his time beat in vain. He had the Roman liking
for what is practical. He tried to be a statesman
and was somewhat of a courtier when to be a courtier
and an upright man was impossible. He was no
Socrates to whom virtue, the fundamentally and in
trinsically right, was more important
than anything
else, than all else, even abstention from the political
turmoil of his
time.
When a long and acrimonious strife is carried on
over a man it is evidence that he is no ordinary per
son. This has been the fate of Seneca in an emi
nent degree. During the Middle Ages, arid even
after their close, a great deal of attention was paid to
his reputed correspondence with St. Paul. The
National Library in Paris contains more than sixty
MSS. of this pseudo^ correspondence. That he was
claimed as a Christian need surprise no one.
The poet
Virgil shared n similar fate; yet there is far less in the
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