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500 DARKNESS AND DAWN
CHAPTER LVIII
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF SENEGA
'
CSt.'
Hoc inter csetera vel pessimum
SENECA.
habet crudelitas, quod perseveraudum
THE family of Spanish Komans from Cordova of which Seneca
was the head had risen to strange prosperity only to be dragged
through deadlier overthrow but the fate of their
; greatest
scion, the poet Lucau, was the most humiliating. He might
seem to have been marked out from infancy as the spoiled
favourite of fortune. While little more than a boy, he had
gained such a reputation for ability, that Nero had summoned
him from Athens before his studies were completed. For a
year or two he was the Emperor's intimate friend, and at the
same time he rose to be the favourite poet and writer of the
day. When he recited in the lecture-rooms he achieved an
He was appointed augur and quaestor
astonishing success.
before the legal age, and when, as quaestor, he exhibited games
to the people, he was received with thunders of applause as
loud as those which had greeted Virgil in the days of Augustus.
It is impossible to imagine a giddier pinnacle of temptation
for a hot-blooded Spanish youth of genius, who at the age of
twenty could not have been a friend and courtier of Nero
without being plunged into every sort of moral temptation.
Let it be remembered in Lucan's honour, that if he did not
escape from that furnace unscathed if his hair had been
singed and the smell of fire had passed upon his garments
he yet never showed himself lost to virtue. In the midst of
deplorable weakness he retained his conviction that freedom,
and truth, and purity, were best.
Nero's jealousy showed itself in the most public and insulting
manner, when one day he got up and went out of the room
for no reason whatever, in the middle of one of Lucan's readings.
It culminated in a prohibition to Lucan to read or