without execration.  In a passage, quoted by St. Augustine (De Civit.  Dei, iv. 11) from his lost book on Superstitions, Seneca speaks of the multitude of their proselytes, and calls them “gens sceleratissima,” a “most criminal race.”  It has been often conjectured—­it has even been seriously believed—­that Seneca had personal intercourse with St. Paul and learnt from him some lessons of Christianity.  The scene on which we have just been gazing will show us the utter unlikelihood of such a supposition.  Probably the nearest opportunity which ever occurred to bring the Christian Apostle into intellectual contact with the Roman philosopher was this occasion, when St. Paul was dragged as a prisoner into the presence of Seneca’s elder brother.  The utter contempt and indifference with which he was treated, the manner in which he was summarily cut short before he could even open his lips in his own defence, will give us a just estimate of the manner in which Seneca would have been likely to regard St. Paul.  It is highly improbable that Gallio ever retained the slightest impression or memory of so every-day a circumstance as this, by which alone he is known to the world.  It is possible that he had not even heard the mere name of Paul, and that, if he ever thought of him at all, it was only as a miserable, ragged, fanatical Jew, of dim eyes and diminutive stature, who had once wished to inflict upon him a harangue, and who had once come for a few moments “betwixt the wind and his nobility.”  He would indeed have been unutterably amazed if anyone had whispered to him that well nigh the sole circumstance which would entitle him to be remembered by posterity, and the sole event of his life by which he would be at all generally known, was that momentary and accidental relation to his despised prisoner.

But Novatus—­or, to give him his adopted name, Gallio—­presented to his brother Seneca, and to the rest of the world, a very different aspect from that under which we are wont to think of him.  By them he was regarded as an illustrious declaimer, in an age when declamation was the most valued of all accomplishments.  It was true that there was a sort of “tinkle,” a certain falsetto tone in his style, which offended men of robust and severe taste; but this meretricious resonance of style was a matter of envy and admiration when affectation was the rage, and when the times were too enervated and too corrupt for the manly conciseness and concentrated force of an eloquence dictated by liberty and by passion.  He seems to have acquired both among his friends and among strangers the epithet of “dulcis,” “the charming or fascinating Gallio:”  “This is more,” says the poet Statius, “than to have given Seneca to the world, and to have begotten the sweet Gallio.”  Seneca’s portrait of him is singularly faultless.  He says that no one was so gentle to any one as Gallio was to every one; that his charm of manner won over even the people whom mere chance threw in his way, and