Of Marcus Annaeus Seneca, the father of our philosopher, we know few personal particulars, except that he was a professional rhetorician, who drew up for the use of his sons and pupils a number of oratorical exercises, which have come down to us under the names of Suasoriae and Controversiae.  They are a series of declamatory arguments on both sides, respecting a number of historical or purely imaginary subjects; and it would be impossible to conceive any reading more utterly unprofitable.  But the elder Seneca was steeped to the lips in an artificial rhetoric; and these highly elaborated arguments, invented in order to sharpen the faculties for purposes of declamation and debate, were probably due partly to his note-book and partly to his memory.  His memory was so prodigious that after hearing two thousand words he could repeat them again in the same order.  Few of those who have possessed such extraordinary powers of memory have been men of first-rate talent, and the elder Seneca was no exception.  But if his memory did not improve his original genius, it must at any rate have made him a very agreeable member of society, and have furnished him with an abundant store of personal and political anecdotes.  In short, Marcus Seneca was a well-to-do, intelligent man of the world, with plenty of common sense, with a turn for public speaking, with a profound dislike and contempt for anything which he considered philosophical or fantastic, and with a keen eye to the main advantage.

His wife Helvia, if we may trust the panegyric of her son, was on the other hand a far less commonplace character.  But for her husband’s dislike to learning and philosophy she would have become a proficient in both, and in a short period of study she had made a considerable advance.  Yet her intellect was less remarkable than the nobility and sweetness of her mind; other mothers loved their sons because their own ambition was gratified by their honours, and their feminine wants supplied by their riches; but Helvia loved her sons for their own sakes, treated them with liberal generosity, but refused to reap any personal benefit from their wealth, managed their patrimonies with disinterested zeal, and spent her own money to bear the expenses of their political career.  She rose superior to the foibles and vices of her time.  Immodesty, the plague-spot of her age, had never infected her pure life.  Gems and pearls had little charms for her.  She was never ashamed of her children, as though their presence betrayed her own advancing age.  “You never stained your face,” says her son, when writing to console her in his exile, “with walnut-juice or rouge; you never delighted in dresses indelicately low; your single ornament was a loveliness which no age could destroy; your special glory was a conspicuous chastity.”  We may well say with Mr. Tennyson—­

     “Happy he
      With such a mother! faith in womankind
      Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high
      Comes easy to him, and, though he trip and fall,
      He shall not blind his soul with clay.”