Nero, meanwhile, to whom the news of these circumstances was taken, having no dislike to Paulina, and unwilling to incur the odium of too much bloodshed, ordered her death to be prohibited and her wounds to be bound.  She was already unconscious, but her slaves and freedmen succeeded in saving her life.  She lived a few years longer, cherishing her husband’s memory, and bearing in the attenuation of her frame, and the ghastly pallor of her countenance, the lasting proofs of that deep affection which had characterised their married life.

Seneca was not yet dead, and, to shorten these protracted and useless sufferings, he begged his friend and physician Statius Annaeus to give him a draught of hemlock, the same poison by which the great philosopher of Athens had been put to death.  But his limbs were already cold, and the draught proved fruitless.  He then entered a bath of hot water, sprinkling the slaves who stood nearest to him, with the words that he was pouring a libation to Jupiter the Liberator.[36] Even the warm water failed to make the blood flow more speedily, and he was finally carried into one of those vapour baths which the Romans called sudatoria, and stifled with its steam.  His body was burned privately, without any of the usual ceremonies.  Such had been his own wish, expressed, not after the fall of his fortunes, but at a time when his thoughts had been directed to his latter end, in the zenith of his great wealth and conspicuous power.

[Footnote 36:  Sicco Polentone, an Italian, who wrote a Life of Seneca (d. 1461), makes Seneca a secret Christian, and represents this as an invocation of Christ, and says that he baptized himself with the water of the bath!]

So died a Pagan philosopher, whose life must always excite our interest and pity, although we cannot apply to him the titles of great or good.  He was a man of high genius, of great susceptibility, of an ardent and generous temperament, of far-sighted and sincere humanity.  Some of his sentiments are so remarkable for their moral beauty and profundity that they forcibly remind us of the expressions of St. Paul.  But Seneca fell infinitely short of his own high standard, and has contemptuously been called “the father of all them that wear shovel hats.”  Inconsistency is written on the entire history of his life, and it has earned him the scathing contempt with which many writers have treated his memory.  “The business of a philosopher,” says Lord Macaulay, in his most scornful strain, “was to declaim in praise of poverty, with two millions sterling out at usury; to meditate epigrammatic conceits about the evils of luxury in gardens which moved the envy of sovereigns; to rant about liberty while fawning on the insolent and pampered freedmen of a tyrant; to celebrate the divine beauty of virtue with the same pen which had just before written a defence of the murder of a mother by a son.”  “Seneca,” says Niebuhr, “was an accomplished man of the world, who occupied himself very much with virtue, and may have considered himself to be an ancient Stoic.  He certainly believed that he was a most ingenious and virtuous philosopher; but he acted on the principle that, as far as he himself was concerned, he could dispense with the laws of morality which he laid down for others, and that he might give way to his natural propensities.”