F. W. Farrar

“ If her milder husband interferes, she not only justifies the cruelty, but asks in amazement: "What! is a slave so much of a human being?" No wonder that there was a proverb, "As many slaves, so many foes." No wonder that many masters lived in perpetual fear, and that "the tyrant's devilish plea, necessity," might be urged in favor of that odious law which enacted that, if a master was murdered by an unknown hand, the whole body of his slaves should suffer death,--a law which more than once was carried into effect under the reigns of the Emperors. ”

“ If he has not yet attained to charity in all that fulness of meaning which Christianity has given to the word he has already gained its unction, and one cannot read his book, unique in the history of Pagan philosophy, without thinking of the sadness of Pascal and the gentleness of Fénélon. We must pause before this soul, so lofty and so pure, to contemplate ancient virtue in its softest brilliancy, to see the moral delicacy to which profane doctrines have attained--how they laid down their pride, and how penetrating a grace they have found in their new simplicity. ”

“ Seneca made the rarer and the wiser choice in giving his entire enthusiasm to the study of philosophy.
I say the wiser choice, because eloquence is not a thing for which one can give a receipt as one might give a receipt for making eau-de-Cologne. Eloquence is the noble, the harmonious, the passionate expression of truths profoundly realized, or of emotions intensely felt. It is a flame which cannot be kindled by artificial means. Rhetoric may be taught if any one thinks it worth learning; but eloquence is a gift as innate as the genius from which it springs. ”

“ You must conceal nothing; you must have nothing to conceal. You must be known as the spy and messenger of God among mankind.
"You must teach men that happiness is not there, where in their blindness and misery they seek it. It is not in strength, for Myro and Ofellius were not happy: not in wealth, for Croesus was not happy: not in power, for the Consuls are not happy: not in all these together, for Nero, and Sardanapalus, and Agamemnon sighed, and wept, and tore their hair, and were the slaves of circumstances and the dupes of semblances. ”

“ How near does it place him to Hercules himself.' So that, by heaven, one might justly salute him, 'Hail, marvellous conqueror, who hast conquered, not these miserable boxers and athletes, nor these gladiators who resemble them.' And should you thus be accustomed to train yourself, you will see what shoulders you will get, what nerves, what sinews, instead of mere babblements, and nothing more. This is the true athlete, the man who trains himself to deal with such semblances as these. Great is the struggle, divine the deed; it is for kingdom, for freedom, for tranquillity, for peace. ”

“ So blameless was the conduct of Marcus Aurelius that neither the malignity of contemporaries nor the sprit of posthumous scandal has succeeded in discovering any flaw in the extreme integrity of his life and principles. But meanness will not be baulked of its victims. The hatred of all excellence which made Caligula try to put down the memory of great men rages, though less openly, in the minds of many. They delight to degrade human life into that dull and barren plain "in which every molehill is a mountain, and every thistle a forest-tree." ”

“ He is intrepid in dangers, free from all passion, happy in adversity, calm in the storm; he alone knows how to live, because he alone knows how to die; he is the master of the world, because he is master of himself, and the equal of God; he looks down upon everything with sublime imperturbability, despising the sadnesses of humanity and smiling with irritating loftiness at all our hopes and all our fears. ”

“ Doubtless Helvia, if she survived her sons and grandsons, must have bitterly rued the day when, with her husband and her young children, she left the quiet retreat of a life in Cordova. Each of the three boys grew up to a man of genius, and each of them grew up to stain his memory with deeds that had been better left undone, and to die violent deaths by their own hands or by a tyrant's will. Mela died as we have seen; his son Lucan and his brother Seneca were driven to death by the cruel orders of Nero. ”

“ The memory of every student of English poetry will furnish countless parallels to thoughts like these. How is it that no similar poem could be quoted from the whole range of ancient literature? How is it that to the Greek and Roman poets that morning of life, which should have been so filled with "natural blessedness," seems to have been a blank? How is it that writers so voluminous, so domestic, so affectionate as Cicero, Virgil, and Horace do not make so much as a single allusion to the existence of their own mothers? ”

“ To a heart so affectionate, to a disposition so social, to a mind so active and ambitious as that of Seneca, it must have been doubly bitter to exchange the happiness of his family circle, the splendour of an imperial court, the luxuries of enormous wealth, the refined society of statesmen, and the ennobling intercourse of philosophers for the savage wastes of a rocky island and the society of boorish illiterate islanders, or at the best, of a few other political exiles, all of whom would be as miserable as himself, and some of whom would probably have deserved their fate. ”

“ 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 infinitely short of his own great ideal. ”

“ You will observe a large portion of the audience to whom the philosopher's school is a mere haunt of their leisure. Their object is not to lay aside any vices there, or to accept any law in accordance with which they may conform their life, but that they may enjoy a mere tickling of their ears. Some, however, even come with tablets in their hands, to catch up not things but words. Some with eager countenances and spirits are kindled by magnificent utterances, and these are charmed by the beauty of the thoughts, not by the sound of empty words ”

“ We think of Abelard, humble, silent, patient, God-fearing, tended by the kindly-hearted Peter in the peaceful gardens of Clugny; we think of Bacon, neglected, broken, and despised, dying of the chill caught in a philosophical experiment and leaving his memory to the judgment of posterity; let us think of Seneca, quietly yielding to his destiny without a murmur, cheering the constancy of the mourners round him during the long agonies of his enforced suicide and dictating some of the purest utterances of Pagan wisdom almost with his latest breath. ”

“ Another of the constant precepts of Epictetus is that we should aim high; we are not to be common threads in the woof of life, but like the laticlave on the robe of a senator, the broad purple stripe which gave lustre and beauty to the whole. But how are we to know that we are qualified for this high function? How does the bull know, when the lion approaches, that it is his place to expose himself for all the herd? If we have high powers we shall soon be conscious of them, and if we have them not we may gradually acquire them. ”

“ But from first to last it will be abundantly obvious to every thoughtful mind that alike the morality and the philosophy of Paganism, as contrasted with the splendour of revealed truth and the holiness of Christian life, are but as moonlight is to sunlight. The Stoical philosophy may be compared to a torch which flings a faint gleam here and there in the dusky recesses of a mighty cavern; Christianity to the sun pouring into the inmost depths of the same cavern its sevenfold illumination. ”

“ Their glory shines the purer and brighter from the midst of a corrupt and deplorable society. Epictetus showed that a Phrygian slave could live a life of the loftiest exaltation; Aurelius proved that a Roman Emperor could live a life of the deepest humility. The one--a foreigner, feeble, deformed, ignorant, born in squalor, bred in degradation, the despised chattel of a despicable freedman, surrounded by every depressing, ignoble, and pitiable circumstance of life--showed how one who seemed born to be a wretch could win noble happiness and immortal memory ”

“ It was a commonplace of ancient philosophy that the life of the wise man should be a contemplation of, and a preparation for, death. It certainly was so with Marcus Aurelius. The thoughts of the nothingness of man, and of that great sea of oblivion which shall hereafter swallow up all that he is and does, are ever present to his mind; they are thoughts to which he recurs more constantly than any other, and from which he always draws the same moral lesson. ”

“ If those who rose above the level of the multitude--if those whom some form of excellence, and often of virtue, elevated into the reverence of their fellows--present to us a few examples of stainless life, can we hope that a tolerable ideal of sanctity was attained by any large proportion of the ordinary myriads? Seeing that the dangerous lot of the majority was cast amid the weltering sea of popular depravity, can we venture to hope that many of them succeeded in reaching some green island of purity, integrity, and calm? ”

“ It lies in yourselves: in true freedom, in the absence or conquest of every ignoble fear; in perfect self-government; in a power of contentment and peace, and the 'even flow of life' amid poverty, exile, disease, and the very valley of the shadow of death. Can you face this Olympic contest? Are your thews and sinews strong enough? Can you face the fact that those who are defeated are also disgraced and whipped? ”

“ We do not choose our own parts in life, and have nothing to do with those parts; our simple duty is confined to playing them well. The slave may be as free as the consul; and freedom is the chief of blessings; it dwarfs all others; beside it all others are insignificant, with it all others become needless, without it no others are possible. No one can insult you if you will not regard his words or deeds as insults. ”

“ I have thus freely criticised the radical defects of Stoicism, so far as Seneca is its legitimate exponent; but I cannot consent to leave him with the language of depreciation, and therefore here I will once more endorse what an anonymous writer has said of him: "An unconscious Christianity covers all his sentiments. If the fair fame of the man is sullied, the aspiration to a higher life cannot be denied to the philosopher; if the tinkling cymbal of a stilted Stoicism sometimes sounds through the nobler music, it still leaves the truer melody vibrating on the ear." ”

“ I wish that those boys of our day, who think it undignified to travel second-class, who dress in the extreme of fashion, wear roses in their buttonholes, and spend upon ices and strawberries what would maintain a poor man for a year, would learn how infinitely more noble was the abstinence of this young Roman, who though born in the midst of splendour and luxury, learnt from the first to loathe the petty vice of gluttony, and to despise the unmanliness of self-indulgence. ”

“ Their belief in a personal deity was confused with their belief in nature, which, in the language of a modern sceptic, "acts with fearful uniformity: stern as fate, absolute as tyranny, merciless as death; too vast to praise, too inexorable to propitiate, it has no ear for prayer, no heart for sympathy, no arm to save." How different the soothing and tender certainty of the Christian's hope, for whom Christ has brought life and immortality to light! For "chance" is not only "the daughter of forethought," as the old Greek lyric poet calls her, but the daughter also of love. ”