Seekers after God

The exact date of Seneca's birth is uncertain, but it took place in all probability about seven years before the commencement of the Christian era. It will give to his life a to...

For a reason which I have already indicated--I mean the habitual reticence of the ancient writers respecting the period of their boyhood--it is not easy to form a very vivid con...

We have gleaned from Seneca's own writings what facts we could respecting his early education. But in the life of every man there are influences of a far more real and penetrati...

The personal notices of Seneca's life up to the period of his manhood are slight and fragmentary. From an incidental expression we conjecture that he visited his aunt in Egypt w...

"The swarm that in the noontide beam were born? Gone to salute the rising Morn. Fair laughs the Morn, and soft the zephyr blows, While proudly riding o'er the azure realm, In ga...

While the senators were deliberating, the soldiers were acting. They felt a true, though degraded, instinct that to restore the ancient forms of democratic freedom would be alik...

So, in A.D. 41, in the prime of life and the full vigour of his faculties, with a name stained by a charge of which he may have been innocent, but of which he was condemned as g...

There are some misfortunes of which the very essence consists in their continuance. They are tolerable so long as they are illuminated by a ray of hope. Seclusion and hardship m...

Of the last five years of Seneca's weary exile no trace has been preserved to us. What were his alternations of hope and fear, of devotion to philosophy and of hankering after t...

Scarcely had the grave closed over Messalina when the court was plunged into the most violent factions about the appointment of her successor. There were three principal candida...

The imperial youth, whose destinies are now inextricably mingled with those of Seneca, was accompanied to the throne by the acclamations of the people. Wearied by the astuteness...

Nor was it unnatural that it should be. Moral precepts, philosophic guidance were no longer possible to one whose compliances or whose timidity had led him so far as first to sa...

The false charge which had been brought against Seneca, and in which the name of Piso had been involved, tended to urge that nobleman and his friends into a real and formidable...

In the spring of the year 61, not long after the time when the murder of Agrippina, and Seneca's justifications of it, had been absorbing the attention of the Roman world, there...

And yet in a very high sense of the word Seneca may be called, as he is called in the title of this book, a Seeker after God; and the resemblances to the sacred writings which m...

In the court of Nero, Seneca must have been thrown into more or less communication with the powerful freedmen of that Emperor, and especially with his secretary or librarian, Ep...

Whether any of these great thoughts would have suggested themselves _spontaneously_ to Epictetus--whether there was an inborn wisdom and nobleness in the mind of this slave whic...

is not an eventful life, and the conditions which surrounded it are very circumscribed. Great men, it has been observed, have often the shortest biographies; their real life is...

It is nearly certain that Epictetus never committed any of his doctrines to writing. Like his great exemplar. Socrates, he contented himself with oral instruction, and the bulk...

The _Discourses_ of Epictetus, as originally published by Arrian, contained eight books, of which only four have come down to us. They are in many respects the most valuable exp...

The life of the noblest of Pagan Emperors may well follow that of the noblest of Pagan slaves. Their glory shines the purer and brighter from the midst of a corrupt and deplorab...

On the death of Hadrian in A. D. 138, Antoninus Pius succeeded to the throne, and, in accordance with the late Emperor's conditions, adopted Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Commodus....

But this imperial elevation kindled no glow of pride or self-satisfaction in his meek and chastened nature. He regarded himself as being in fact the servant of all. It was his d...

Emperor as he was, Marcus Aurelius found himself in a hollow and troublous world; but he did not give himself up to idle regret or querulous lamentations. If these sorrows and p...