Between Heathenism and Christianity - College of Stoic Philosophers

Seneca: His Character and Environment
than many pages of theory. A prefect of the city,
Pedanius Secundus by name, was murdered by one
of his slaves and the criminal could not be appre
hended. According to law, all the bondmen of the
murdered man, four hundred in
put to death. The populace,
number, were to be
to their honor be it
said, more humane than the senators, raised a tumult
of protest against the execution of the sentence.
Their sympathy availed nothing; the unhappy vic
tims were led away to die. One of the senators even
proposed a decree that all the freedmen belonging to
the household of the late prefect should be trans
ported beyond the confines of Italy. But the em
peror, and that emperor was Xero, more humane than
the optimates, alleged that the laws were already
severe enough, and that it would be cruel to add to
their severity by fresh enactments. The decree of
Yet Tacitus, from whom
expulsion was not passed.
this narrative is taken, a writer who never tires of
lamenting the degeneracy of his age, has not a word
of compassion for the unfortunate sufferers, nor a
syllable of condemnation for an atrocious law.
Still it must be said that some of the
Roman phi
losophers, especially Cicero and Seneca, lay stress in
their writings, upon the universal brotherhood of
about the intrinsic
man. They have much to say
worth of the human soul. While these ideas are
largely borrowed from the Greeks, or at least sug
gested by Greek philosophers, the Romans are singu
larly eloquent in proclaiming them. But slavery is
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