However faulty and inconsistent Seneca may have been, there was at any rate no possibility that he should divide with a Tigellinus the direction of his still youthful master.  He was by no means deceived as to the position in which he stood, and the few among Nero’s followers in whom any spark of honour was left informed him of the incessant calumnies which were used to undermine his influence.  Tigellinus and his friends dwelt on his enormous wealth and his magnificent villas and gardens, which could only have been acquired with ulterior objects, and which threw into the shade the splendour of the Emperor himself.  They tried to kindle the inflammable jealousies of Nero’s feeble mind by representing Seneca as attempting to rival him in poetry, and as claiming the entire credit of his eloquence, while he mocked his divine singing, and disparaged his accomplishments as a harper and charioteer because he himself was unable to acquire them.  Nero, they urged was a boy no longer; let him get rid of his schoolmaster, and find sufficient instruction in the example of his ancestors.

Foreseeing how such arguments must end; Seneca requested an interview with Nero; begged to be suffered to retire altogether from public life; pleaded age and increasing infirmities as an excuse for desiring a calm retreat; and offered unconditionally to resign the wealth and honours which had excited the cupidity of his enemies, but which were simply due to Nero’s unexampled liberality during the eight years of his government, towards one whom he had regarded as a benefactor and a friend.  But Nero did not choose to let Seneca escape so lightly.  He argued that, being still young, he could not spare him, and that to accept his offers would not be at all in accordance with his fame for generosity.  A proficient in the imperial art of hiding detestation under deceitful blandishments, Nero ended the interview with embraces and assurances of friendship.  Seneca thanked him—­the usual termination, as Tacitus bitterly adds, of interviews with a ruler—­but nevertheless altered his entire manner of life, forbade his friends to throng to his levees, avoided all companions, and rarely appeared in public—­wishing it to be believed that he was suffering from weak health, or was wholly occupied in the pursuit of philosophy.  He well knew the arts of courts, for in his book on Anger he has told an anecdote of one who, being asked how he had managed to attain so rare a gift as old age in a palace, replied, “By submitting to injuries, and returning thanks for them.”  But he must have known that his life hung upon a thread, for in the very same year an attempt was made to involve him in a charge of treason as one of the friends of C. Calpurnius Piso, an illustrious nobleman whose wealth and ability made him an object of jealousy and suspicion, though he was naturally unambitious and devoid of energy.  The attempt failed at the time, and Seneca was able triumphantly to refute the charge of any treasonable design.  But the fact of such a charge being made showed how insecure was the position of any man of eminence under the deepening tyranny of Nero, and it precipitated the conspiracy which two years afterwards was actually formed.