This passage will furnish us with an excellent example of Seneca’s invariable method of improving every occasion and circumstance into an opportunity for a philosophic harangue.

By this wife, who died shortly before Seneca’s banishment to Corsica, he had two sons, one of whom expired in the arms and amid the kisses of Helvia less than a month before Seneca’s departure for Corsica.  To the other, whose name was Marcus, he makes the following pleasant allusion.  After urging his mother Helvia to find consolation in the devotion of his brothers Gallio and Mela, he adds, “From these turn your eyes also on your grandsons—­to Marcus, that most charming little boy, in sight of whom no melancholy can last long.  No misfortune in the breast of any one can have been so great or so recent as not to be soothed by his caresses.  Whose tears would not his mirth repress? whose mind would not his prattling loose from the pressure of anxiety? whom will not that joyous manner of his incline to jesting? whose attention, even though he be fixed in thought, will not be attracted and absorbed by that childlike garrulity of which no one can grow tired?  God grant that he may survive me:  may all the cruelty of destiny be weared out on me!”

Whether the prayer of Seneca was granted we do not know; but, as we do not again hear of Marcus, it is probable that he died before his father, and that the line of Seneca, like that of so many great men, became extinct in the second generation.

It was probably during this period that Seneca laid the foundations of that enormous fortune which excited the hatred and ridicule of his opponents.  There is every reason to believe that this fortune was honourably gained.  As both his father and mother were wealthy, he had doubtless inherited an ample competency; this was increased by the lucrative profession of a successful advocate, and was finally swollen by the princely donations of his pupil Nero.  It is not improbable that Seneca, like Cicero, and like all the wealthy men of their day, increased his property by lending money upon interest.  No disgrace attached to such a course; and as there is no proof for the charges of Dio Cassius on this head, we may pass them over with silent contempt.  Dio gravely informs us that Seneca excited an insurrection in Britain, by suddenly calling in the enormous sum of 40,000,000 sesterces; but this is in all probability the calumny of a professed enemy.  We shall refer again to Seneca’s wealth; but we may here admit that it was undoubtedly ungraceful and incongruous in a philosopher who was perpetually dwelling on the praises of poverty, and that even in his own age it attracted unfavourable notice, as we may see from the epithet Proedives, “the over-wealthy,” which is applied to him alike by a satiric poet and by a grave historian.  Seneca was perfectly well aware that this objection could be urged against him, and it must be admitted that the grounds on which he defends himself in his treatise On a Happy Life are not very conclusive or satisfactory.