might perhaps have been better for Seneca’s happiness if he had never left Corsica, or set his foot again in that Circean and bloodstained court.  Let it, however, be added in his exculpation, that another man of undoubted and scrupulous honesty,—­Afranius Burrus—­a man of the old, blunt, faithful type of Roman manliness, whom Agrippina had raised to the Prefectship of the Praetorian cohorts, was willing to share his danger and his responsibilities.  Yet he must have lived from the first in the very atmosphere of base and criminal intrigues.  He must have formed an important member of Agrippina’s party, which was in daily and deadly enmity against the party of Narcissus.  He must have watched the incessant artifices by which Agrippina secured the adoption of her son Nero by an Emperor whose own son Britannicus was but three years his junior.  He must have seen Nero always honoured, promoted, paraded before the eyes of the populace as the future hope of Rome, whilst Britannicus, like the young Edward V. under the regency of his uncle, was neglected, surrounded with spies, kept as much as possible out of his father’s sight, and so completely thrust into the background from all observation that the populace began seriously to doubt whether he were alive or dead.  He must have seen Agrippina, who had now received the unprecedented honour of the title “Augusta” in her lifetime, acting with such haughty insolence that there could be little doubt as to her ulterior designs upon the throne.  He must have known that his splendid intellect was practically at the service of a woman in whom avarice, haughtiness, violence, treachery, and every form of unscrupulous criminality had reached a point hitherto unmatched even in a corrupt and pagan world.  From this time forth the biography of Seneca must assume the form of an apology rather than of a panegyric.

[Footnote 33:  Gallio was Proconsul of Achaia about A.D. 53, when St. Paul was brought before his tribunal.  Very possibly his elevation may have been due to the restoration of Seneca’s influence.]

The Emperor could not but feel that in Agrippina he had chosen a wife even more intolerable than Messalina herself.  Messalina had not interfered with the friends he loved, had not robbed him of the insignia of empire, had not filled his palace with a hard and unfeminine tyranny, and had of course watched with a mother’s interest over the lives and fortunes of his children.  Narcissus would not be likely to leave him long in ignorance that, in addition to her other plots and crimes, Agrippina had been as little true to him as his former unhappy wife.  The information sank deep into his heart, and he was heard to mutter that it had been his destiny all along first to bear, and then to avenge, the enormities of his wives.  Agrippina, whose spies filled the palace, could not long remain uninformed of so significant a speech; and she probably saw with an instinct quickened by the awful terrors of her own guilty conscience that the Emperor showed distinct signs of his regret for having married his niece, and adopted her child to the prejudice, if not to the ruin, of his own young son.  If she wanted to reach the goal which she had held so long in view no time was to be lost.  Let us hope that Seneca and Burrus were at least ignorant of the means which she took to effect her purpose.