L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits | Page 4

and Augustine speak of as
"Seneca noster," who was believed to have corresponded with St. Paul,

and upon whom [Footnote: On the "De Clementia," an odd subject for
the man who burned Servetus alive for differing with him.] Calvin
wrote a commentary, seems almost forgotten in modern times. Perhaps
some of his popularity may have been due to his being supposed to be
the author of those tragedies which the world has long ceased to read,
but which delighted a period that preferred Euripides to Aeschylus:
while casuists must have found congenial matter in an author whose
fantastic cases of conscience are often worthy of Sanchez or Escobar.
Yet Seneca's morality is always pure, and from him we gain, albeit at
second hand, an insight into the doctrines of the Greek philosophers,
Zeno, Epicurus, Chrysippus, &c., whose precepts and system of
religious thought had in cultivated Roman society taken the place of the
old worship of Jupiter and Quirinus.
Since Lodge's edition (fol. 1614), no complete translation of Seneca has
been published in England, though Sir Roger L'Estrange wrote
paraphrases of several Dialogues, which seem to have been enormously
popular, running through more than sixteen editions. I think we may
conjecture that Shakespeare had seen Lodge's translation, from several
allusions to philosophy, to that impossible conception "the wise man,"
and especially from a passage in "All's Well that ends Well," which
seems to breathe the very spirit of "De Beneficiis."
"'Tis pity-- That wishing well had not a body in it Which might be felt:
that we, the poorer born, Whose baser stars do shut us up in wishes,
Might with effects of them follow our friends And show what we alone
must think; which never Returns us thanks."
All's Well that ends Well," Act i. sc. 1.
Though, if this will not fit the supposed date of that play, he may have
taken the idea from "The Woorke of Lucius Annaeus Seneca
concerning Benefyting, that is too say, the dooing, receyving, and
requyting of good turnes, translated out of Latin by A. Golding. J. Day,
London, 1578." And even during the Restoration, Pepys's ideal of
virtuous and lettered seclusion is a country house in whose garden he
might sit on summer afternoons with his friend, Sir W. Coventry, "it
maybe, to read a chapter of Seneca." In sharp contrast to this is
Vahlen's preface to the minor Dialogues, which he edited after the
death of his friend Koch, who had begun that work, in which he
remarks that "he has read much of this writer, in order to perfect his

knowledge of Latin, for otherwise he neither admires his artificial
subtleties of thought, nor his childish mannerisms of style" (Vahlen,
preface, p. v., ed. 1879, Jena).
Yet by the student of the history of Rome under the Caesars, Seneca is
not to be neglected, because, whatever may be thought of the intrinsic
merit of his speculations, he represents, more perhaps even than Tacitus,
the intellectual characteristics of his age, and the tone of society in
Rome--nor could we well spare the gossiping stories which we find
imbedded in his graver dissertations. The following extract from Dean
Merivale's "History of the Romans under the Empire" will show the
estimate of him which has been formed by that accomplished writer:--
"At Rome, we, have no reason, to suppose that Christianity was only
the refuge of the afflicted and miserable; rather, if we may lay any
stress on the documents above referred to, it was first embraced by
persons in a certain grade of comfort and respectability; by persons
approaching to what we should call the MIDDLE CLASSES in their
condition, their education, and their moral views. Of this class Seneca
himself was the idol, the oracle; he was, so to speak, the favourite
preacher of the more intelligent and humane disciples of nature and
virtue. Now the writings of Seneca show, in their way, a real anxiety
among this class to raise the moral tone of mankind around them; a
spirit of reform, a zeal for the conversion of souls, which, though it
never rose, indeed, under the teaching of the philosophers, to boiling
heat, still simmered with genial warmth on the surface of society. Far
different as was their social standing-point, far different as were the
foundations and the presumed sanctions of their teaching respectively,
Seneca and St. Paul were both moral reformers; both, be it said with
reverence, were fellow-workers in the cause of humanity, though the
Christian could look beyond the proximate aims of morality and
prepare men for a final development on which the Stoic could not
venture to gaze. Hence there is so much in their principles, so much
even in their language, which agrees together, so that the one has been
thought, though it must be allowed