ibation to Jupiter the Liberator.[36] Even the warm
water failed to make the blood flow more speedily, and he was finally
carried into one of those vapour baths which the Romans called
_sudatoria_, and stifled with its steam. His body was burned privately,
without any of the usual ceremonies. Such had been his own wish,
expressed, not after the fall of his fortunes, but at a time when his
thoughts had been directed to his latter end, in the zenith of his great
wealth and conspicuous power.

[Footnote 36: Sicco Polentone, an Italian, who wrote a Life of Seneca
(d. 1461), makes Seneca a secret Christian, and represents this as an
invocation of Christ, and says that he baptized himself with the water
of the bath!]

So died a Pagan philosopher, whose life must always excite our interest
and pity, although we cannot apply to him the titles of great or good.
He was a man of high genius, of great susceptibility, of an ardent and
generous temperament, of far-sighted and sincere humanity. Some of his
sentiments are so remarkable for their moral beauty and profundity that
they forcibly remind us of the expressions of St. Paul. But Seneca fell
infinitely short of his own high standard, and has contemptuously been
called "the father of all them that wear shovel hats." Inconsistency is
written on the entire history of his life, and it has earned him the
scathing contempt with which many writers have treated his memory. "The
business of a philosopher," says Lord Macaulay, in his most scornful
strain, "was to declaim in praise of poverty, with two millions sterling
out at usury; to meditate epigrammatic conceits about the evils of
luxury in gardens which moved the envy of sovereigns; to rant about
liberty while fawning on the insolent and pampered freedmen of a tyrant;
to celebrate the divine beauty of virtue with the same pen which had
just before written a defence of the murder of a mother by a son."
"Seneca," says Niebuhr, "was an accomplished man of the world, who
occupied himself very much with virtue, and may have considered himself
to be an ancient Stoic. He certainly believed that he was a most
ingenious and virtuous philosopher; but he acted on the principle that,
as far as he himself was concerned, he could dispense with the laws of
morality which he laid down for others, and that he might give way to
his natural propensities."

In Seneca's life, then, we see as clearly as in those of many professing
Christians that it is