No trace of the villa where this pathetic tragedy took place can now be seen; but near the spot where it must have stood, close beside the road, is a marble bas-relief of the death of Atys, the son of Croesus, killed in the chase by Adrastus, placed upon a modern pedestal; and this is supposed to have formed part of the tomb of Seneca.  There is no inscription; probably none would be allowed during the lifetime of Nero; and we know that his body was burned privately without any of the usual ceremonies.  But if this fragment of sculpture be genuine, the well-known classic story which it tells was an appropriate memorial of one who perished in the midst of the greatest prosperity.  No one who is familiar with the history of this “seeker after God,” this philosopher who was a pagan John the Baptist in the severity and purity of his mode of life, and in the position which he occupied on the border-line between paganism and Christianity, and who left behind him some of the noblest utterances of antiquity, can gaze upon this interesting bas-relief without being deeply moved.  It speaks eloquently of the little dependence to be placed upon the favour of princes; and it points a powerful moral that has been repeatedly enforced in sacred as well as profane history, that he who becomes the accomplice of another in crime, strikes, by that complicity, the death-blow of friendship, and makes himself more hated than even the victim of the crime had been.  When Seneca sanctioned, and then defended on political grounds, the matricide of Nero, from that moment his own doom was sealed.  Over the former “guide, philosopher, and friend,” the shadow of this guilty secret rested, and it deepened and darkened until the pupil embrued his hands in the blood of his teacher.  This touching fragment of sculpture is all that now remains of the earthly pomp of one who at one time stood on the very highest summit of human wisdom.  There is no likelihood that he ever met the Apostle Paul during his residence in the imperial city, or learned from him any of those precepts that are so wonderfully Christian in their spirit and even words; although an early Christian forger thought it worth while to fabricate a supposititious correspondence between them.  The only link of connection between them was the problematical one that St. Paul, with his wide sympathies, may have gazed with interest upon Seneca’s villa, as it was pointed out to him on his journey to Rome; and that he was on one occasion dragged as a prisoner into the presence of Seneca’s elder brother, that Gallio who dismissed the charge and the accusers with contempt.