[Footnote 51:  Consol. ad Polyb. 27; Ad Helv. 17; Ad Marc. 24, seqq.]

[Footnote 52:  Ep. 32; De Benef. iii. 2.]

[Footnote 53:  De Ira, iii. 29, 32.]

[Footnote 54:  Ibid. i. 14; De Vit. beat. 24.]

[Footnote 55:  Ep. 55, 9.]

[Footnote 56:  Ibid. 28; De Oti Sapientis, 31.]

He is to be regarded rather as a wealthy, eminent, and successful Roman, who devoted most of his leisure to moral philosophy, than as a real philosopher by habit and profession.  And in this point of view his very inconsistencies have their charm, as illustrating his ardent, impulsive, imaginative temperament.  He was no apathetic, self-contained, impassible Stoic, but a passionate, warm-hearted man, who could break into a flood of unrestrained tears at the death of his friend Annaeus Serenus,[57] and feel a trembling solicitude for the welfare of his wife and little ones.  His was no absolute renunciation, no impossible perfection;[58] but few men have painted more persuasively, with deeper emotion, or more entire conviction, the pleasures of virtue, the calm of a well-regulated soul, the strong and severe joys of a lofty self-denial.  In his youth, he tells us, he was preparing himself for a righteous life, in his old age for a noble death.[59] And let us not forget, that when the hour of crisis came which tested the real calm and bravery of his soul, he was not found wanting.  “With no dread,” he writes to Lucilius, “I am preparing myself for that day on which, laying aside all artifice or subterfuge, I shall be able to judge respecting myself whether I merely speak or really feel as a brave man should; whether all those words of haughty obstinacy which I have hurled against fortune were mere pretence and pantomime....  Disputations and literary talks, and words collected from the precepts of philosophers, and eloquent discourse, do not prove the true strength of the soul.  For the mere speech of even the most cowardly is bold; what you have really achieved will then be manifest when your end is near.  I accept the terms, I do not shrink from the decision.” [60]

[Footnote 57:  Ep. 63.]

[Footnote 58:  Martha, Les Moralistes, p. 61.]

[Footnote 59:  Ep. 61.]

[Footnote 60:  Ep. 26.]

“Accipio conditionem, non reformido judicrum.”  They were courageous and noble words, and they were justified in the hour of trial.  When we remember the sins of Seneca’s life, let us recall also the constancy of his death; while we admit the inconsistencies of his systematic philosophy, let us be grateful for the genius, the enthusiasm, the glow of intense conviction, with which he clothes his repeated utterance of truths, which, when based upon a surer basis, were found adequate for the moral regeneration of the world.  Nothing is more easy than to sneer at Seneca, or to write clever epigrams on one whose moral attainments fell