[Footnote 7: 
     “Juvenal, eleve dans les cris de l’ecole
      Poussa jusqu’a l’exces sa mordante hyperbole.”—­
      BOILEAU.]

The philosophic teaching which even from boyhood exercised a powerful fascination on the eager soul of Seneca was at least something better than this; and more than one of his philosophic teachers succeeded in winning his warm affection, and in moulding the principles and habits of his life.  Two of them he mentions with special regard, namely Sotion the Pythagorean, and Attalus the Stoic.  He also heard the lectures of the fluent and musical Fabianus Papirius, but seems to have owed less to him than to his other teachers.

Sotion had embraced the views of Pythagoras respecting the transmigration of souls, a doctrine which made the eating of animal food little better than cannibalism or parricide.  But, even if any of his followers rejected this view, Sotion would still maintain that the eating of animals, if not an impiety, was at least a cruelty and a waste.  “What hardship does my advice inflict on you?” he used to ask.  “I do but deprive you of the food of vultures and lions.”  The ardent boy—­for at this time he could not have been more than seventeen years old—­was so convinced by these considerations that he became a vegetarian.  At first the abstinence from meat was painful, but after a year he tells us (and many vegetarians will confirm his experience) it was not only easy but delightful; and he used to believe, though he would not assert it as a fact, that it made his intellect more keen and active.  He only ceased to be a vegetarian in obedience to the remonstrance of his unphilosophical father, who would have easily tolerated what he regarded as a mere vagary had it not involved the danger of giving rise to a calumny.  For about this time Tiberius banished from Rome all the followers of strange and foreign religions; and, as fasting was one of the rites practiced in some of them, Seneca’s father thought that perhaps his son might incur, by abstaining from meat, the horrible suspicion of being a Christian or a Jew!

Another Pythagorean philosopher whom he admired and whom he quotes was Sextius, from whom he learnt the admirable practice of daily self-examination:—­“When the day was over, and he betook himself to his nightly rest, he used to ask himself, What evil have you cured to day?  What vice have you resisted?  In what particular have you improved?” “I too adopt this custom,” says Seneca, in his book on Anger, “and I daily plead my cause before myself, when the light has been taken away, and my wife, who is now aware of my habit, has become silent; I carefully consider in my heart the entire day, and take a deliberate estimate of my deeds and words.”