ure should ever become a tool in the hands of more powerful
intriguers. But we do not hear of any attempt on Seneca's part to urge
upon Nero the fulfillment of this high duty, and we find him sinking
into the degraded position of an accomplice with young profligates like
Otho, as the confident of a dishonourable love. Such conduct, which
would have done discredit to a mere courtier, was to a Stoic
disgraceful. But the principle which led to it is the very principle to
which we have been pointing,--the principle of moral compromise, the
principle of permitting and encouraging what is evil in the vain hope of
thereby preventing what is worse. It is hardly strange that Seneca
should have erred in this way, for compromise was the character of his
entire life. He appears to have set before himself the wholly impossible
task of being both a genuine philosopher and a statesman under the
Caesars. He prided himself on being not only a philosopher, but also a
man of the world, and the consequence was, that in both capacities he
failed. It was as true in Paganism as it is in Christianity, that a man
_must_ make his choice between duty and interest--between the service of
Mammon and the service of God. No man ever gained anything but contempt
and ruin by incessantly halting between two opinions.

And by not taking that lofty line of duty which a Zeno or an Antisthenes
would have taken, Seneca became more or less involved in some of the
most dreadful events of Nero's reign. Every one of the terrible doubts
under which his reputation has suffered arose from his having permitted
the principle of expedience to supercede the laws of virtue. One or two
of these events we must briefly narrate.

We have already pointed out that the Nemesis which for so many years had
been secretly dogging the footsteps of Agrippina made her tremble under
the weight of its first cruel blows when she seemed to have attained the
highest summit of her ambition. Very early indeed Nero began to be
galled and irritated by the insatiate assumption and swollen authority
of "the best of mothers." The furious reproaches which she heaped upon
him when she saw in Acte a possible rival to her power drove him to take
refuge in the facile and unphilosophic worldliness of Seneca's
concessions, and goaded him almost immediately afterwards into an
atrocious crime. He naturally looked on Britannicus, the youthful son of
Claudius, with even more suspicion and hatred than that