e severity and
purity of his mode of life, and in the position which he occupied on
the border-line between paganism and Christianity, and who left behind
him some of the noblest utterances of antiquity, can gaze upon this
interesting bas-relief without being deeply moved. It speaks
eloquently of the little dependence to be placed upon the favour of
princes; and it points a powerful moral that has been repeatedly
enforced in sacred as well as profane history, that he who becomes the
accomplice of another in crime, strikes, by that complicity, the
death-blow of friendship, and makes himself more hated than even the
victim of the crime had been. When Seneca sanctioned, and then
defended on political grounds, the matricide of Nero, from that moment
his own doom was sealed. Over the former "guide, philosopher, and
friend," the shadow of this guilty secret rested, and it deepened and
darkened until the pupil embrued his hands in the blood of his
teacher. This touching fragment of sculpture is all that now remains
of the earthly pomp of one who at one time stood on the very highest
summit of human wisdom. There is no likelihood that he ever met the
Apostle Paul during his residence in the imperial city, or learned
from him any of those precepts that are so wonderfully Christian in
their spirit and even words; although an early Christian forger
thought it worth while to fabricate a supposititious correspondence
between them. The only link of connection between them was the
problematical one that St. Paul, with his wide sympathies, may have
gazed with interest upon Seneca's villa, as it was pointed out to him
on his journey to Rome; and that he was on one occasion dragged as a
prisoner into the presence of Seneca's elder brother, that Gallio who
dismissed the charge and the accusers with contempt.

Passing two massive fragments of a wall, which are supposed to have
formed part of a small temple of Jupiter, beside which numerous
Christians suffered martyrdom, we come, at the fifth milestone, to a
spot associated with one of those poetical legends which occur in the
early annals of all nations, and whose hold upon the minds of men is
itself an historic truth. Here was the boundary between the territory
of Rome and that of Alba. Here was situated the entrenchment called
the Cluilian Dyke, where Hannibal encamped, and where previously the
Roman and Alban armies were drawn up in battle array, when it was
agreed that the quarrel bet