A Disputed Correspondence

“LUCIUS ANNÆUS SENECA, a native of Cordova, disciple of Sotion the Stoic and uncle of the poet Lucan, was a man of most continent life. I should not, however, place him in the catalogue of the saints, were it not for those letters of Paul to Seneca, and Seneca to Paul, which many persons are now reading. In these letters, written when Seneca was Nero’s tutor and the most powerful man of the time, he says that he would gladly hold the same place among his own people that Paul held among the Christians. Two years before Peter and Paul received the crown of martyrdom. Seneca was put to death by Nero. ” So wrote St. Jerome in his notes on the ecclesiastical authors; and a little later. St. Augustine, when urging upon one Macedonius the duty of charity to sinners, appeals to a maxim of the Roman philosopher: “Rightly says Seneca, who lived in the time of the Apostles, and certain of whose letters to St. Paul are in circulation, ‘He who hates evil-doers hates every one.’

Certainly no imaginable correspondence in the Latin tongue could have a deeper interest than one in which these two men might be seen reasoning together. Fourteen letters purporting to have passed between them exist, but their authenticity, scarcely questioned in the church until near the time of the Reformation, has been warmly debated ever since. Before, however, recapitulating the arguments on either side, and before even referring to the text of the correspondence, it will be well briefly to review the events of Seneca’s life up to the time when personal relations between him and St. Paul first became possible, — the year, that is to say, when the latter, having invoked his rights as a Roman citizen, was brought to Rome to stand trial.

L. Annæus Seneca was born very near the beginning of the Christian era, being the second of the three sons of Marcus Annaeus Seneca and his wife Helvia. Of his two brothers, the elder, Marcus Novatus, received by adoption the name of Junius Gallio, and the younger, Lucius Annaeus Mela, became the father of the poet Lucan. The elder Seneca came to Rome in the time of Augustus, and made a considerable fortune there. His wife appears to have stayed behind in Cordova, where, however, he paid her frequent visits. He was of equestrian rank and Roman ancestry. She was of genuine Spanish stock, and seems to have been by far the more interesting character of the two. What we know of her early days is chiefly to be gleaned from a letter written by her son to console her for his own exile in the year 41.

The mother of Helvia having died in giving her birth, she and an elder sister grew up under a stepmother, “whom,” says Seneca, “you constrained to become a true mother to you by showing her all the love and deference an own daughter could have done.” Both of the girls married well, as the phrase goes, and both were left widows in early middle life. The husband of this aunt of Seneca’s, “a good, brave, and most indulgent man,” was prefect of Egypt for sixteen years, ‘Muring which time his wife was never seen in public, nor admitted to her house a single provincial; nor did she ever prefer a request to her husband, or suffer any favor to be sought through herself. And so that gossiping province, ever ingenious in the defamation of its prefects, where to avoid fault is by no means to escape slander, had the opportunity of beholding a unique example of purity of life, and even succeeded in preserving decency of speech (a very difficult thing in a society prone to unsavory jesting), and still desires, though it can scarcely hope, again to behold that lady’s like.”

Seneca’s mother took him to Rome while he was still an infant, and he was educated in the schools of the rhetoricians and philosophers there. At one time he inclined to the legal profession, but relinquished it, some have thought, through fear of the jealousy of Caligula, who piqued himself, as we know, upon his own eloquence. To philosophy, on the contrary, Seneca remained always faithful, making it a point, so long as he lived, to lose no chance of hearing the best instructors.

At first he called himself a Pythagorean, and, having embraced the doctrine that animals have souls, he adopted a vegetarian diet. “And after a year’s time,” he says in a letter to his friend Luchius, “this habit had become not only easy, but pleasant, and I fancied that my mind was more alert, though I would not now venture to assert that this was so. Do you ask me why I gave up that regimen ? The days of my youth fell in the reign of Tiberius Caesar, a time of great religious agitation and innovation, and the abstinence of certain persons from animal food was considered a proof of superstition.¹ So at the request of my father, who hated not philosophy, but greatly dreaded calumny, I resumed my former habits, easily resigning myself, after all, to better dinners.”

During the prefecture of his uncle Seneca paid a visit to Egypt, and some of his biographers have attempted to show that he prolonged his travels as far as the extreme East. A treatise on India he certainly did compose, but it has not been preserved. What the upholders of the Oriental theory wish to prove is that Seneca visited Jerusalem (through which city he would naturally have passed, on his way from Egypt to India), and thus became acquainted with the dogmas of Christianity at their fountain head. There is really no evidence either way.

On his return to Rome he wrote a treatise on Egypt, and also a letter of consolation, which has become a classic, and which has often been compared with the beautiful letter written by Sulpicius to Cicero at the time of Tullia’s death, and that by Jerome to Paula on the loss of her daughter Blæsilla. This epistle was addressed to a Roman matron of the vieille souche, named Marcia, whose father had been stoned to death, and his books burned in the Forum, for having called Brutus “the last of the Romans,” and whose son, also, had just come to an untimely end.

Far less honorable to Seneca was the eulogy upon Messalina, which he seems to have composed at about this time, but which was afterwards suppressed. It is possible, indeed, that the scattered references in other authors to Seneca’s laudation of the Empress may all refer to some composition of the time of his exile, and that this, in turn, may not have been a separate piece, but only the missing paragraphs of the Consolation to Polybius. Messalina, at all events, who probably detested his pragmatical ways, procured, in the year 41 or 42, when her influence over her husband, Claudius, was supreme, his disgrace and banishment to Corsica. Certain rhetorical hints of the philosopher’s own, dropped in the Consolation to Polybius, would appear to show that the senate, of which he was a member, first condemned him to death, and that Claudius then commuted the sentence to one of exile.

The crime of which he was accused was adultery with Julia Livilla, the Emperor’s niece, and the youngest child of Germanicus and Agrippina. She had passed almost the whole of her brother Caligula’s reign in exile, and now she was put to death.

From Corsica Seneca dispatched that letter of consolation to his mother Helvia which has been already noted. In this, beside some interesting reminiscences of boyhood and items of family history, we find a clear outline of the writer’s philosophy, which he afterwards amplified in the letters to Lucilius. It is the formal stoicism of the man who proposes to be sufficient unto himself; who in prosperity foresees the coming of evil days, and when they are upon him finds comfort in the thought that change is one of the fundamental laws of the universe. “The needs of the body are insignificant. ” he says, — “food, drink, and shelter from the cold. For myself, what I miss is. not luxury, but occupation.” A few sonorous paragraphs in praise of poverty follow, which, though ingenious, do not ring quite true. It was a state of life always recommended (theoretically) by the Stoics, and no doubt there was a certain satisfaction in thus being able publicly to prove one’s self equal to its conditions; for the Roman who professed philosophy, in those days, was usually more or less a poseur. But Corsica must have been a depressing residence for a popular young Roman senator, of ambitious temper and active mind, and the problem of what to do with the long, long days a hard one to solve. “This country does not abound, ” he tells his mother, “either in fruit or shade trees. It is watered by no navigable rivers. In fact, it produces none of those things which the foreigner covets, but barely enough to support its own inhabitants. Nor are there any precious stones here, nor do veins of gold or silver anywhere crop out. But it is a narrow mind which finds pleasure in these things of earth; we ought rather to fix our thoughts on those which are everywhere present and illumine all places alike.”

Further on he says that he whiles away a good deal of time by observing the stars and their motions, “in so far as a man may lawfully do.” He evidently wished to divert any suspicion that he was dabbling in astrology, though it would surely have been pardonable, however futile, had he tried to ascertain in this fashion the probable term of his exile.

He must have written a good deal in Corsica, composing a portion, at least, of his numerous tragedies, beside some ten epigrams where philosophical resignation is hardly the prevailing note. After reading these, one has little difficulty in accepting as genuine the Consolation to Polybius. This man was a freedman of Claudius, and stood high, during the early years of Seneca’s exile, both in the Emperor’s good graces and in the yet more compromising favor of Messalina; so that his correspondent, one fears, could have had but one motive in addressing him.

We have lost the first half of this document, but its tenor is easily surmised. Its ostensible occasion was the recent death of a brother of Polybius, and the changes are rung to a wearisome length on the text of par nobile fratrum. Polybius is officially told, like the young laureate in the hour of his great bereavement, “that other friends remain, that loss is common to the race,” etc.; but, over and above all such trite and obvious considerations, he is reminded that he has a perpetual solace for whatever may befall him in the existence and government of Caesar. “While he presides over human affairs, you surely need not be sensible of any lack. In him alone is all protection and consolation. Rouse yourself, and when your eyes fill with tears turn them upon Cæsar. At the sight of that august and most glorious divinity they will at once be dry. His dazzling splendor shall rivet your gaze, and render you blind to all meaner objects.”

Seneca’s panegyrists have endeavored to deny the authenticity of this groveling letter of condolence, but they certainly cannot quote for the defense the testimony of Dion Cassius. “Seneca.” he says, “paid court to Messalina and the freedmen of Claudius even to the point of addressing them from his island a book filled with their praises, which book, from very shame, he afterwards suppressed. ”

In any case, it was not to Polybius, or Claudius, or Messalina that he owed his recall from an exile which lasted until 49. The death of Polybius was contrived by Messalina, whose own shameful career ended in 48. Soon after her death Claudius took for a fourth wife his niece Agrippina, the daughter of Germanicus, and widow of Domitius Ahenobarbus, to whom she bad borne one son, now eleven years old, destined long to be remembered under the name of Nero. This is the Agrippina whose majestic seated figure and refined, inscrutable, middle - aged face are known to all the world through the Capitoline statue and its reproductions. She soon contrived the betrothal of the son of her first marriage to Octavia, the daughter of Claudius and Messalina, and then began to scheme for the removal of Oetavia’s only brother Britannieus from the pathway of her boy. She also looked about her to find a suitable tutor for the prince; for she wanted a man of distinction, who should at the same time be devoted to herself, and she made a clever choice.

“Agrippina,” says Tacitus, “got Annæus Seneca recalled from exile, and at the same time made prefect; for she thought he would be popular on account of the splendor of his attainments, and she desired to have Domitius ” (Nero) “pass his boyhood under that. sort, of master, and get the benefit of his counsels in case he came into power. Seneca was also supposed to be bound to Agrippina by the memory of her kindness to himself, as well as incensed against Claudius by all he had suffered on account of the injurious accusation of the latter.” The fact that Agrippina took Seneca’s part from the first is indeed the best possible refutation of the malicious charge brought against him and her sister Julia.

Seneca entered upon his new duties with alacrity, though they involved a return to that costly and artificial mode of life against which he never ceased to protest upon parchment. A couple of years later Agrippina gave him an associate in the person of Afranius Burrus, and Tacitus tells us how these two distributed their labors, and highly commends the harmony that reigned between them, — “a rare thing, indeed.” as he truly remarks, “in a ease of divided authority.”

“Burrus instructed the imperial pupil in the art of war, at the same time setting him a high example by the strictness of his own life. Seneca taught him the elements of oratory and the principles of honor and courtesy. ”

It can never be certainly known whether or no Seneca was privy to the poisoning of Claudius. Agrippina was no doubt quite equal to managing the whole affair, but that her son’s tutor was no mourner for the Emperor, whom he had flattered so outrageously, he has left us abundant proof in the savagely satirical piece which he composed concerning the death of Claudius and his reception in Olympus.² It is written partly in prose and partly in verse, and opens with a kind of jocularly official report of the circumstances attending the Emperor’s translation.

“I propose to state what took place in heaven on the thirteenth day of October, in the consulate of Asinius Marcellus and Acilius Acciola, —otherwise the new or initial year of a most fortunate era. I shall nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice ” (nihil offensœ nec gratiœ dabitur), he says, in words which one would think that Othello must consciously or unconsciously have quoted. In the mock-heroic numbers which describe the miserable exit of Claudius from this life there is, naturally, no mention of poisoned mushrooms; the scene then changes to the council-hall of Jove. “Word was brought of the arrival of a big fellow with gray hair, who appeared very much put out about something, for he kept wagging his head and scuffing with his right foot.³ Questioned as to his nationality, he replied in a thick and agitated voice. Apparently he did not know his own language; he seemed to be neither a Greek nor a Roman, nor of any other race with which one is acquainted. Jupiter then commanded Hercules, on the strength of his having been so great a traveler and knowing all nations, to go and find out what manner of man this might be.” Hercules was at first rather disgusted with the commission, but concluded to regard it in the light of a thirteenth labor, and, having questioned the newcomer in the plainest of Greek, he finally extracted an intelligible answer in that tongue, to the effect that this was Cæsar, and a descendant of those who fought at Troy. “And he might have made his story go down with Hercules, ” the narrative goes on to say,

“had not the goddess Febris stepped up, who alone of all the divinities of Rome had left her temple upon the Palatine to accompany Claudius on high. ' This fellow is telling you a pack of lies,’ she said. 'I can inform you—and I have lived with him long enough to know—that he was horn at Lyons. You see before you a fellow-townsman of Munatius. He teas born. I tell you, sixteen miles from Vienne, and he is a German Gaul; and of course, being a Gaul, he captured Rome. Can’t you understand? He was born, I say. at Lyons, where Licinius reigned for so many years. You, at least, turning upon Hercules. ‘ who have tramped over more ground than any peripatetic mule-driver, ought to know Lyons, and how far it is from the Xanthus to the Rhone! ’ ”

This is the style of Seneca’s mocking Trauerspiel. Some of his jokes may be galvanized into a semblance of life by free translation, but not all. We need not follow minutely the animated debate which ensued among the Olympians on the merits of Claudius as a candidate for admission to their circle. At length the Emperor Augustus obtained the floor, and, for the first time, apparently, since his deification, arose to speak: —

“I appeal to you. Conscript Fathers, to whom I owe my promotion to divinity, to say whether I have not hitherto kept quiet and minded my own business. But I can no longer dissemble, nor, I may say, contain the sorrow, aggravated by shame, which I feel upon this occasion.” He then proceeds to recite a catalogue of Claudius’s crimes: “You killed Messalina, whose greatuncle I was,⁴ as well as your own. Do you plead ignorance ? Then I say — and may the gods confound you! — that such ignorance was worse than the crime itself. Why,” again addressing the court, — “why. this fellow is a mere plagiarist of Cains Cæsar " (Caligula), “who is dead. The one killed his father-in-law, the other his son-inlaw. Caius Cæsar denied the title of Great to the son of Crassus; this man restored him the title, but took away his head. The scoundrel has put to death in one family alone Crassus Magnus, Scribonia” (his mother), “Tristonia, and Assarion, all of noble blood, and Crassus, such a fool that he might almost have sat on a throne ! Only consider, Conscript Fathers, what a monster of ugliness it is who has applied for admission among you. . . . Who would worship such a god as this, who believe in him ? All I have to say is, that if you make gods of this kind you will get nobody to believe in your own divinity.”

He then offers a resolution exeluding Claudius from Olympus, which is unanimously carried, whereupon Mercury gives the neck of the prisoner a twist, and promptly drags him off to Hades; allowing him, as they go, a glimpse of his own funeral procession in the Via Sacra. The occasion seemed to he one for the most part of uproarious merriment; only a few lawyers were shedding tears ! But when Seneca goes on to give the words of the dirge which the professional mourners were singing, we experience a slight shock, so strikingly does it resemble some of the best known hymns of the mediaeval church: —

The manner in which Messalina is mentioned in this satire maybe thought to foreshadow the break which was soon to occur between the tutor of Nero and that maîtresse femme his mother. Agrippina was the real head of the government, and such she intended to remain; but Seneca and Burrus could hardly have been faithful to their trust without endeavoring to counteract her influence over the mind of her son. Tacitus tells us that they interfered to prevent her putting to death certain of her private enemies; and a little later he relates how Seneca thwarted her resolve to receive an embassy, seated openly on the throne at Nero’s side, instead of remaining discreetly hidden behind the hangings, as etiquette required.

In short, there was soon a declared rivalry between the Emperor’s masters and his mother. But Agrippina was not easily beaten. She brought forward Claudius’s son Britannicus, now fifteen years of age, and prepared to set up his claim to the throne. Nero discovered her plan, had Britannicus poisoned, and looked on at his last agony with cynical composure. Agrippina’s next move was an unsuccessful attempt to bribe the senate. On the strength of this she was accused of conspiracy and publicly disgraced, though still allowed to reside at Rome.

Seneca and Burrus managed the affairs of the empire ably, and the former appears to have been but moderately hampered in action by the dictates of his cherished philosophy.

“He was proved,” says Dion Cassius, “to have followed in many respects a line of conduct wholly inconsistent with his maxims. He blamed tyranny, and educated a tyrant; he lifted up his voice against the hangerson of princes, and he was perpetually about the palace. . . . He reviled the rich, and himself possessed a fortune of 7,500,000 drachmæ” (or, roughly speaking, a million and a half of our money). “He talked of the luxury of others, and had in his own house five hundred three-legged tables made of citron wood, with ivory feet, and all of the same size and shape; and he gave gorgeous banquets thereon.”

It would be unfair, perhaps, to judge Seneca’s system of education by its results upon his pupil. Nor need we consider, with Merivale, that the philosopher was privy to the murder of Britannicus. But we really cannot see what excuse he had for congratulating Nero, in the treatise De Clementia, which is dedicated to his imperial patron, on having been no shedder of blood.

Seneca was consul in 57, and probably never stood higher in the Emperor’s favor than during this year, but with the ensuing one began a new era in the palace. Nero fell captive to the demure yet voluptuous beauty of Poppsea Sabina, and began to consider how best he might remove out of his way the various obstacles to their union. He dismissed his former mistress, the devoted freedwoman Acte;⁵ he ordered off Popp sea’s husband to a distaut province ; and then arose the question what was to be done with Agrippina. Many plans were suggested by officious counselors; but that of a certain Anicetus struck Nero as most ingenious. A ship was constructed, warranted to go to pieces at the touch of a spring, and the empress mother was induced, after a pretended reconciliation with her son, to go on board. The mechanism, however, failed to act perfectly, and Agrippina was able to escape by swimming. She saw through the whole plot, of course, but pretended not to do so, and merely sent a freedman to Nero with the significant message that, “by the grace of God and her own good luck, she had escaped a terrible danger.”

However much or little Seneca and Burrus may have known or suspected up to this point, they had now to be taken into the Emperor’s confidence and counsels. The former observed that it would he easy to order the soldiers to dispatch Agrippina. Burrus answered dryly that the praetorian guard, his own especial command, was too loyal to the house of Germanicus to obey such an order; and that he thought it would he better simply to require of Anicetus the fulfillment of his murderous contract. By Anicetus, therefore, and a band of marines Agrippina was eventually put to death.

“So far,” says Tacitus, “all agree. As for Nero’s having gazed on his dead mother and praised the beauty of her body, some deny and some affirm it. She was burned that same night on a dining-couch, with shabby trappings; nor. while Nero reigned, was the earth ever piled up into a harrow, or the spot inclosed. ”

Seneca, alas! composed the false account of the affair dispatched by the Emperor to the senate, and we are not sorry to know that he incurred some obloquy thereby.

There remained but one more insignificant obstacle to the union of Nero and Poppæa, and that was the Emperor’s neglected wife Octavia, one of the most truly pathetic figures of that cruel time.

The tragedy which bears her name, and which, in certain manuscripts, is included among the works of Seneca, is, however, certainly not by him; the very date of its composition has never been determined. It follows closely enough the lines of Tacitus, and is tolerably bad poetry. Justus Lipsius calls it a schoolboy imposition, yet there is a lifelike touch in the words with which Nero puts a stop to his old tutor s remonstrances against his proposed divorce and remarriage: —

The divorce was unquestionably an unpopular measure with the Roman people, and for once Nero was compelled to let drop his machinations for bringing it about. The opposition of Burrus was bold and outspoken,⁶ and the natural consequences followed. Suetonius remarks, with characteristic phlegm, that Nero, having promised Burrus a cure for his ailing throat, sent him poison; while Tacitus, after admitting that some supposed Burrus to have died a natural death, proceeds to give the following anecdote of thetough soldier upon his death-bed: “The prince came in to see him, but Burrus, who was perfectly cognizant of his crime, turned away his face, and merely replied to the assiduous questions of this visitor, ‘I am doing very well.’”

His death foreshadowed the ruin of Seneca. Rufus and Tigellinus, two of the basest of the Emperor’s creatures, became joint prefects of the prætorian guard in his stead. Octavia’s divorce and murder, and the marriage of Nero and Poppæa, —who hated the philosopher as cordially as Messalina had done before her,— took place in the same year, and Seneca began to entreat for permission to retire from the court.

This is the time during which he is thought by the partisans of the Pauline correspondence not merely to have been himself in constant, intercourse with the Apostle, but to have introduced him and his writings to the notice of his imperial master. He must have had enough to do in those days, one would think, to keep his own head on his shoulders, without appearing as the patron of a political prisoner; but let us see what reasons there are for supposing that these two men may have had some personal relations. They may be reduced to three: the great probability that Paul’s case would have been brought to the notice of Seneca; a certain superficial similarity in their writings, which may have been due to Paul’s influence over Seneca; and the letters as they stand.

A word must also be said concerning the date of Paul’s first arrival in Rome. We know that when he was imprisoned at Cæsarea, nearly three years before, Felix, who bad been appointed procurator of Judea early in had held the post “many years.” That is, Paul could not well have arrived in Rome before 59. and it is even more certain that be cannot have come later than 61, because the Apostle was at once handed over to the prætorian prefect, and after the death of Burrus this office was held conjointly by two men.

On the whole, the most probable date is the spring of 61, when Burrus was still in command of the prætorian guard. What more likely than that he should have been struck by the aspect of his prisoner, and the crowd that flocked to receive him, and should have mentioned the circumstances to his friend and colleague, who may already have heard the name of the Apostle from his own brother ? For it will be remembered that, during Paul’s stay at Corinth, the chief Jews of the synagogue there, who were furious at his success as a proselyter, dragged him, upon a trumped - up accusation, into the court of the proconsul of Achaia. Now this high official was no other than the elder brother of our Seneca, adopted by Junius Gallio,—a man of whom we derive, even from the Acts of the Apostles, a decidedly favorable opinion. “Gallio, my brother, a man beloved by all who know him, however slightly, ” says Seneca to Lucilius, and dwells upon his “courtesy and inimitable dignity.”

Some have thought that Gallio may have written to Seneca of the riot at Corinth, and given him his first conceptions of the Christian doctrine nearly ten years before the coming of Paul to Rome. There is not a word in the writings of Seneca as we possess them ⁷ to support such a theory, anymore than there is in the familiar narrative in tlie Acts: “And when Paul was now about to open his mouth, Gallio said unto the Jews, If it were a matter of wrong or wicked lewdness, O ye Jews, reason would that I should bear with you: but if it be a question of words and names, and of your law, look ye to it; for I will be no judge of such matters. And be drave them from the judgment seat. Then all the Greeks took Sosthenes, the chief ruler of the synagogue, and beat him before the judgment seat. And Gallio cared for none of those things. ”

The Roman proconsul, sitting aloft upon his βϒμa, declining with admirable sang-froid either to meddle with a case outside his jurisdiction, or to make too much of the disorderly proceeding whether of Greek or Hebrew mobs, is surely no apologist for the new faith. He is merely a foreign officer, who makes no distinction between Jews and Christians, but confounds them all — as did the average Roman of his class and day — in a common feeling of distrust and contempt.

In Rome, at the time of Paul’s arrival, there seem to have been some fifteen thousand Jews in a total population of from two to three millions. Even then these aliens lived for the most part across the Tiber, in that historic Trastevere whose purlieus are at last being penetrated and its crooked ways made straight by the engines of modern improvement. Prisoners brought from the East to swell the triumph of the great Pompey had formed the nucleus of the colony, but it had been constantly recruited since his day, until now it contained a fair proportion of free men; and there was a good deal of wealth among them. Both Tiberius and Claudius had, however, issued oppressive edicts against the Hebrews, and Suetonius, in bis history of the reign of the latter, makes the singular observation. “He expelled from Rome the Jews who were incessantly brawling under the instigation of Ckrestus.”

This would appear, on the face of it, to refer to flashings between Jews and Christians fierce enough to amount to a disturbance of the peace; and it also seems very likely that Paul owed to this very edict of expulsion his first acquaintance with some of the members of the infant church, for it was to them, after their return to Rome from their temporary exile, that he addressed the letter from Corinth which announced his own proposed voyage to the west. How his plans were thwarted and deferred, and under what circumstances be did finally visit the eternal city, we all know. It was early spring, the perfect moment for southern Italy, when he landed at Pozzuoli; and what would not some of us give to see the prospect that met his view as ho saw it! Across the purple bay lay sumptuous Bake, overshadowed by the fortified villas of Marius, Pompey, and Caesar upon the heights. Bauli, the sinister scene of Agrippina’s murder, was close at hand; the remains of Caligula’s preposterous bridge were doubtless visible still. After a few days’ rest at Pozzuoli, the Apostle turned his face northward, striking the Appian Way, in all probability, at Capua, which was then a flourishing city and a favorite residence of Nero. He crossed near its mouth the river Liris. flowing down from Cicero’s birthplace at Arpinum, and passed through Formiæ, where the best Roman of his day had been murdered not quite a century before. He climbed the hill of Anxur above the modern Terracina, descended thence into the pontine marshes, and, eighteen miles further on, at Appii Forum, was met by a deputation of Roman Christians, while more were waiting for him at the post station of Tres Tabernas, where the cross-road from Antium fell in. At exquisite Aricia he got his first glimpse of Rome; and indeed the rich suburbs of the city must have seemed to begin at his very feet, so crowded was the Campagna at that time with hamlets, villas, and farms. Descending to the plain, he made the final stage of his journey between those pompous lines of tombs of which the very shells and skeletons are still so overpoweringly impressive, and upon his arrival was at once delivered to Burrus, the praetorian prefect.

The liberal treatment of the Apostle by that high officer, who permitted him to hire a house where he eould see his friends and expound his doctrine, is, however, no proof that Burrus himself was interested in the new religion. Paul had committed no crime under the Roman law. Agrippa himself had said that he might have been at once released, if he bad not appealed to the Emperor. His prosecutors had not arrived in Rome, and there was no reason whatever for treating him with severity in the interval before their appearance. Moreover, there seems to have been no change in his position even in the following year, when Burrus was succeeded by that disreputable pair, Rufus and Tigellinus. The two years of Paul’s residence in Rome were years of peace and prosperity for the empire at large, though marked in the moral shuns of the imperial palace by the events already narrated. And all this time the Jew of Tarsus, with the Roman soldier to whom even the light terms of his imprisonment necessitated his being chained, was becoming a familiar figure in Rome, and his preaching had begun to make converts in the very house of Cæsar. Four of his authentic epistles — those to the Colossians, Ephesians, Philippians, and to Philemon — were dictated at this time; and to this time, also, if to any, must belong the correspondence with Seneca.

Of the fourteen letters, six are usually assigned to Paul, and eight to Seneca. The first is by the latter, and begins as follows: —

“ MY DEAR PAUL. — No doubt you have been told that I had quite a discussion yesterday with my friend Lucilius concerning the mysteries of your doctrine and other kindred subjects. Several of the converts to your way of thinking were present. We had retired into the gardens of Sallust for another purpose of our own, when these of whom I have spoken met and joined us. We wished very much that you had been there, and I beg to assure you that, after a reading from your book,— that is to say, after a selection from the various epistles which you have addressed to provincial capitals and other cities,— we found ourselves remarkably refreshed by your precepts concerning the conduct of this mortal life. Some of these reflections I regard as original with yourself; others as rather transmitted than originated by you. The sentiments are so ma jestic, they breathe such extraordinary nobility, that the life of man does not seem to me long enough to fathom and acquire them perfectly.

“With best wishes for your good health, I remain, my brother,

“Yours,” etc.

By way of answer, we have; —

“MY DEAR SENECA, —I was very glad to receive your letter yesterday, and should have replied immediately if I had had a messenger at hand. You will understand that care has to be exercised concerning the person to whom letters are entrusted, and the when and the how. Pray do not think me insensible to your kindness, therefore, if I exercise some caution in selecting a messenger. As to your flattering remarks regarding the reception of my letters in a certain place, I can but congratulate myself on having won the approval of so distinguished a judge; for I do not think that you, censor, sophist, and master of a great prince, would say such things unless you believed them.

“May you live long and prosper.” Seneca to Paul; —

“I have arranged and classified a number of selections from certain volumes with special reference to their being read by Cæsar; and if I should be so happy as to secure his attention and interest, perhaps you also may be present. Otherwise I will appoint a day when you and I may go over this work together. Perhaps it would even be better for me to communicate with you, if I could do so safely, before bringing these writings to his notice, in order that you might be sure that, you had been fairly represented.

“Believe me, my dearest Paul,” etc. Paul to Seneca: —

“Every time I peruse a letter from you, it seems us if you yourself were present; in fact, I have the feeling that you are always with us. When you do begin to come, I trust we shall meet frequently.

“Hoping this will find you well, I remain ” etc.

The next, note, from Seneca, is supposed to refer to the relations of Paul with the chief rabbi of the synagogue at Rome: —

“I am distressed at your keeping so obstinately in the background. What makes you so reserved? If it be the indignation of the master at your having withdrawn from the old faith and ritual, and fixed your affections elsewhere, you will have an opportunity to claim that you did it, not lightly, but after mature deliberation.”

The confused and feeble answer to this mysterious appeal purports to have been addressed by Paul to Seneca and his friend Lucilius conjointly : —

“Concerning the subject of your letter I cannot write with pen and ink, of which the former marks and emphasizes matters, and the latter blazons them abroad; the less since I know that there are certain persons of and among you who are with us and understand me perfectly. Respect must be paid to all, and the more scrupulously the more readily they take offense. If we can but be patient with them, we shall win them over at last, provided only they be capable of repentance.

“Greeting to you both.”

Seneca then writes to Paul and Theophilus; —

“My reading of your epistles to the Galatians, Corinthians, and Achaians was very well received; and now may we so live as to illustrate them to the glory of God. The indwelling Spirit is holier and mightier than you; it lifts you out of yourself, and enables you to give a new and loftier utterance to sublime ideas of antiquity. I could wish, therefore, since your matter is so fine, that the dignity of your style were on a level with it. To be perfectly candid with you, my hi other, and also conscientious with myself, I must tell you that the Augustus was greatly struck by your ideas, but that he exclaimed, when he had heard your exordium to virtue. ‘It is a marvelous thing that a man who has never been properly instructed can think and speak like this! ’ I reminded him that the gods are wont to speak by the mouths of ‘innocents, ’ or even of those who are capable of misrepresenting their doctrine, and I cited the example of a simple rustic, Vaticanus of Reate, to whom they who were in fact Castor and Pollux appeared as two men, which seems to have convinced him. Farewell.”

Paul to Seneca:—

“However satisfactory it may he to know that Caesar is interested in our doctrines, I beg that you will not be dismayed, but simply put upon your guard, if, hereafter, he should become less friendly. You took, as I think, a very grave step in merely bringing to his notice a mode of worship so contrary to that in which he was brought up; for even if he does worship the gods of the Gentiles. I do not see why you should force the fact on his attention,—unless, indeed, you do it out of excessive attachment to me. For the future I beg you to desist. You must not allow your partiality for myself to compromise you with your master.”

After this insult to the memory of the intrepid Apostle, the reader will perhaps feel that he has had enough. But let us run over rapidly the remaining numbers of this correspondence. They are few and short. Seneca replies with vague assurances that he will be more careful in future, and Paul then offers a sort of apology, in his turn, for having written with a freedom hardly consistent with the principles of humility inculcated by bis own religion.

Then follow three letters from Seneca to Paul, of which the order of precedence has been much disputed, but it really makes very little difference which one we take first. Two of them are chiefly complimentary: one containing the passage quoted by St. Jerome about Paul’s predominance in his own sect; the other expressing great admiration for the allegorical and interior sense to he detected in so many of the Apostle’s writings, but also suggesting once again that he would do well to improve his style. The third letter of this group looks, at first sight, especially interesting. It begins with a profession of deep concern for Paul’s personal safety, and a general exhortation, a la mode st&ique, to constancy in misfortune. It then alludes to extensive fires in Rome, for which it more than hints at Nero’s own responsibility. and to the dangers encompassing the whole Christian community. Supposing the letter to be genuine, this could not refer to the great conflagration ; for the details which follow concerning the amount of ground burned over and the number of dwellings destroyed are inconsistent with those given by the unimpeachable chroniclers of the time; and, moreover, the tenor of the letter implies that it was addressed to Paul in Home, whereas the great lire occurred in 64, when we know he was not there.

The fourteenth and last letter of the correspondence purports to he from Paul to Seneca, and runs as follows : —

“There have been revealed to your meditative spirit such things as the Divinity has disclosed to few. I therefore sow good seed in a fertile field; speaking not in a material sense, of that which is corruptible, but of the stable word which cometlx forth from God. who liveth and increaseth [!] forever. The fruit of your wisdom can never fail you, provided only you give no heed to the objections whether of Jews or Gentiles. A new career will be open to you as an author when you begin to set forth with the refinements of rhetoric the irreproachable wisdom of Jesus Christ. It will be yours to recommend your new attainment to the king of the world, his friends and attendants ; but their conversion will be no smooth nor easy task, for the greater part will resist arguments instinct with that vital essence of God’s truth which bringeth forth a man freed from corruption, and a soul ever ready for the corning of the Lord.

“Farewell, my best beloved Seneca.”

Such are the letters which were held by that one of the four great fathers of the church who was best versed in the pagan classics to give Seneca some claim to a place among the holy. One wonders how he could have thought so— how he, of all men, should have failed to suspect an imposture. To us it seems as if no warm admirer of either correspondent could ever have wished to believe them genuine; and indeed St. Jerome’s use of the present tense, quee leguntur a plurimis, — which are (now) read by very many people,— appears in itself to point to the fact that they had been put forth as a recent discovery some time in the fourth century. St. Augustine uses almost precisely the same language; nor has it ever been customary to include the correspondence among the undisputed works either of the Apostle or the philosopher, except for that short period immediately succeeding the revival of learning, —from 1475, say, to 1550, when sacred and profane lore were so wildly and uncritically confounded, in the first glow of humanistic enthusiasm. Erasmus, indeed, who inserted the letters in his edition of the works of Seneca, printed at Bâle in 1529, clears himself conclusively, in his trenchant commentary, from the imputation of accepting them as genuine. He denounces them roundly as a forgery “both frigid and inept; ” permits himself even to say that “the divine Hieronymus, who must have seen through the cheat, abused the credulity of the simple by according them such notice as he did ; ” explodes in righteous wrath at the chétif and shuffling figure which “the bravest of gospel warriors” is made to cut in these lines; and apologizes to the reader, at the end of his diatribe, for having said “nhnis nndta de re nihili.”

Modern Catholic writers, on the other hand, have usually rather yearned to establish the orthodoxy of Seneca. One does not quite see why; for, as Erasmus points out, he was surely a more striking moralist, and may he read with more profit, as a pagan than as a Christian. Amedee Fleury, who has consecrated two laborious volumes to the relations of this eminent pair, and who thinks that there have been two sets of spurious letters, and that the one which we possess is not even the same which was read by SS. Jerome and Augustine, sums up bis own position by saying that he is by no means as fully convinced of any interchange of letters between Paul and Seneca as be is of the reality of their friendship; while that gloriously overbearing idealist, Count Joseph de Maistre, has seldom given himself a more delightful démenti than on this very subject:—

“ ‘Do you believe,’ the senator asks him, in the ninth of the Petersburg ‘evenings, ’ ' in the Christianity of Seneca, and his epistolary correspondence with St. Paul? ’

‘I should he very unwilling,’ replies the count, ‘to speak positively one way or the other, but I believe that there is a foundation of truth in both suppositions; and I am just as sure that Seneca heard Paul preach as that you hear me at this moment. ’ ”

Considering that the senator was an imaginary interlocutor, this does not appear greatly to strengthen the case in favor of Seneca’s Christian privileges.

Fifty years after De Maistre, and fifteen or so after Floury. Charles Aubertin, in his Etude sur les Rapports Supposes between St. Paul and Seneca, disposed with little ceremony of the theory of a second false correspondence, and, after an exceedingly minute and learned inquiry into the source of those expressions in the philosophical writings of Seneca which have been thought to savor most of Christian influence, announced it as his conclusion that if Seneca were a Christian, so were Cicero, Zeno, and the entire Porch; even Menander, in his New Comedy, might lay some claim to the title, and Plato was more Christian than they all.⁸

Paul left Rome in the year 63, not returning until 68,— whether voluntarily or under a second arrest we do not know, — to meet, in the serene spirit of the grand passage, “I am now ready to be offered, ” etc., the death of a Christian martyr. Seneca lived on for two years from the time of Paul s departure, in the semi-retirement which he courted ever after the death of Burras. During this interval he composed the treatises De Otio, De Providentia, and the Quæstiones Naturales, a few tragedies, and also, it is thought, almost all of those Letters to Lucilius which contain a full exposition of his philosophy. The singular poverty of these last in personal details, or illustrations of the life of the time, will excite no wonder when we find how superciliously Seneca regarded the gossiping propensities of Cicero.

“ I am never at a loss. ” he says, “for the wherewithal to fill my letters, without having recourse to such matters as abound in the epistles of Cicero, such as; who is going to stand for office; who trusts to his own powers, and who to another’s; who expects to get the consulate through Cæsar’s influence, and who through that of Pompey; what, a skinflint Cæcilius is, and how his very relatives cannot get money from him at less than twelve per cent.”

In 65, Nero, now perfectly enslaved to the whims of Poppæa, made use of the discovery of Piso’s conspiracy to charge his old tutor with complicity in the plot, and so rid himself of a silent hut none the less inconvenient censor, Seneca was respectfully permitted to he his own executioner, and to choose the manner of his death; and he followed the example of Thrasea, and so many more of the best Romans of that hitter epoch, in electing to open his veins in the presence of his weeping friends, and of the centurion who had been sent to him, probably in his villa on the Via Nomentana, a few miles from Rome, “to announce,” as Tacitus says, “the last necessity.” He died like a brave pagan, encouraging his attendants, and endeavoring to console his beloved wife Paulina, whom, with true consideration, he besought to leave the room, that she might not. witness his lingering agony. As a pagan we And him honorable and admirable in his end; while the aphorisms which follow, and which are selected almost at random from his grave and sententious letters, may he read, as Erasmus says, with all the more profit. if we regard them as the independent utterances of unassisted pagan wisdom.

“All that we have, dear Lucilius, belongs to others. There is but one thing which is truly our own, and that is time.”

“’T is not the man who has little that is poor, but he who desires to have more.”

“There is a tricksy element even in misfortune. It may come ; it may not. Meanwhile, let us hope for the best. ”

“Philosophy teaches us to act, not to talk.”

“ What is wisdom? It is always to choose the same thing, and always to refuse the same. And we need not even add the small proviso that the thing chosen be the right thing, for no one can, by any possibility, find a lasting pleasure in that which is not right.”

“The pang which I can bear is light; that which I cannot bear is brief.”

“My friend Demetrius says that a perfectly safe life, and one exempt from all reverses, would be a Dead Sea. ”

“ Leisure without letters is death; or, rather, it is being buried alive.”

“What am I to do? Life dies from me, and death pursues. Is there no remedy? Yes. If I do not dy from death, life will not dy from me.”

“I enjoy life because I am ready to leave it. ”

“ Long time we have been scattering. Now, surely, in our old age, we may begin without reproach to gather in. We have lived at sea; let us die in port.”

“ That death which we so dread and shun interrupts life, does not destroy it. A day is coming which will restore us to the light.”

Harriet Waters Preston.

Louise Hodge.