The reply of Seneca was either unsatisfactory or the tyrant had decided to be rid of his former guide.  As in more recent times in Japan the condemned man was expected to be his own executioner, and Seneca opened his veins and allowed the life to ooze from them with a stoicism that was certainly heroic if not untainted by theatrical display.  The character of Seneca will ever remain one of the puzzles of history, for the grave moralist was accessory to the murder of Agrippina, and not unsuspected of licentiousness, and of the accumulation of an enormous fortune of three hundred million sestertii by injustice and fraud.  The statements of Dion Cassius as to the misdeeds of the philosopher must be weighed against the absence of any condemnation of his proceedings in the pages of Tacitus.

The Theodore Cerem named on p. 12, is Theodorus Cyrenaicus, who was probably a native of Cyrene, and a disciple of Aristippus.  He was banished from the (supposed) place of his birth, and was shielded at Athens by Demetrius Phalerus, whose exile he is assumed to have shared.  Whilst in the service of Egypt he was sent as an ambassador to Lysimachus, whom he offended by the directness and plainness of his speech.  The offended monarch threatened him with crucifixion, and he replied in a phrase which became famous, “Threaten thus your courtiers, for it matters not to me whether I rot on the ground or in the air."[40] The king’s threat was not executed, as Theodorus was afterwards at Corinth, and is believed to have died at Cyrene.  That he was condemned to drink hemlock is a statement cited from Amphicrates by Diogenes Laertius (Aristippus, xv.).  The anecdote of his colloquy with Lysimachus would easily be perverted into a belief that he had been put to death for the freedom with which he exercised his biting wit.

The Democreon mentioned at pp. 12 and 16 is Democritus of Abdera, of whom the anecdote is told.  He was a man whose knowledge and wisdom won even the respect of Timon, the universal scoffer.  The tradition that he deprived himself of sight with a view to philosophic abstraction is mentioned by Cicero, Aulus Gellius, and others, but it is hardly necessary to account for a too uncommon calamity by a supposition so remarkable.

The transformations of some of the names are peculiar.  At p. 12 we read of Defortes.  The philosopher disguised under this strange name appears to be Socrates.  The story is told in the Apology of Socrates attributed to Xenophon.  The person to whom the saying was addressed was not Xanthippe, but was a disciple named Apollodorus, whose understanding was not equal to his admiration.

The statement that Didymus voluntarily blinded himself is made both by Jerome (Ep. 68) and in the Ecclesiastical History of Socrates (iv. 29).  Didymus was born 309 or 314, and became blind at the age of four, as the result of disease.  He learned the alphabet by wooden letters, and by application and force of character became learned in all the learning of his time.  Is this a real anticipation of the use of raised letters for the blind?  What would be the use of a knowledge of the alphabet so acquired in obtaining that skill in geometry, rhetoric, arithmetic, and music for which he was famous?  He owed to Athanasius his position as head of the Catechetical School of Alexandria.