It was however the Stoic Attalus who seems to have had the main share in the instruction of Seneca; and his teaching did not involve any practical results which the elder Seneca considered objectionable.  He tells us how he used to haunt the school of the eloquent philosopher, being the first to enter and the last to leave it.  “When I heard him declaiming,” he says, “against vice, and error, and the ills of life, I often felt compassion for the human race, and believed my teacher to be exalted above the ordinary stature of mankind.  In Stoic fashion he used to call himself a king; but to me his sovereignty seemed more than royal, seeing that it was in his power to pass his judgments on kings themselves.  When he began to set forth the praises of poverty, and to show how heavy and superfluous was the burden of all that exceeded the ordinary wants of life, I often longed to leave school a poor man.  When he began to reprehend our pleasures, to praise a chaste body, a moderate table, and a mind pure not from all unlawful but even from all superfluous pleasures, it was my delight to set strict limits to all voracity and gluttony.  And these precepts, my Lucilius, have left some permanent results; for I embraced them with impetuous eagerness, and afterwards, when I entered upon a political career, I retained a few of my good beginnings.  In consequence of them, I have all my life long renounced eating oysters and mushrooms, which do not satisfy hunger but only sharpen appetite; for this reason I habitually abstain from perfumes, because the sweetest perfume for the body is none at all:  for this reason I do without wines and baths.  Other habits which I once abandoned have come back to me, but in such a way that I merely substitute moderation for abstinence, which perhaps is a still more difficult task; since there are some things which it is easier for the mind to cut away altogether than to enjoy in moderation.  Attalus used to recommend a hard couch in which the body could not sink; and, even in my old age, I use one of such a kind that it leaves no impress of the sleeper.  I have told you these anecdotes to prove to you what eager impulses our little scholars would have to all that is good, if any one were to exhort them and urge them on.  But the harm springs partly from the fault of preceptors, who teach us how to argue, not how to live; and partly from the fault of pupils, who bring to their teacher a purpose of training their intellect and not their souls.  Thus it is that philosophy has been degraded into mere philology.”

In another lively passage, Seneca brings vividly before us a picture of the various scholars assembled in a school of the philosophers.  After observing that philosophy exercises some influence even over those who do not go deeply in it, just as people sitting in a shop of perfumes carry away with them some of the odour, he adds, “Do we not, however, know some who have been among the audience of a philosopher