click to read pdf file - The Preterist Archive

SENECA AND HIS VISITORS 53
'
Nevertheless, I agree with Musonius that stylists who do not
act up to their own precepts should be called fiddlers and not
philosophers.'
When Cornutus rose to leave, the feelings of the most envied
man in Rome were far from enviable. He would have
given much to secure the Stoic's approval. And yet the
sophistries by which he blinded his own bitter feelings were
unshaken. ' Cornutus,' he said to himself, ' is not only discourteous
but unpractical. Theory
is one thing ;
life another.
We are in Rome, not in Plato's Atlantis.'
Seneca lived to find out that facing both ways
is certain
failure, and that a man cannot serve two masters.
In point of fact the struggle was going on for the preponderance
of influence over Nero. Agrippina thought that she
could use him as a gilded figurehead of the ship of state,
while she stood at the helm and directed the real course.
Burrus and Seneca, distrusting her cruelty and ambition, believed
that they could render her schemes nugatory, and convert
Nero into a constitutional prince. Both efforts were
alike foiled. The passions which were latent in the temperament
of the young Emperor were forced into rank growth by
influences incomparably less virile than that of his mother,
and incomparably more vile than those of the soldier and
the philosopher. Otho was a more effective tutor than
for Otho's
Seneca, and Seneca's own vacillation paved the way
corrupting spell. Claudius had been governed by an ' aristocracy
of valets '
Nero was to be
;
governed neither by the
daughter of Gerrnanicus nor by the Stoic moralist, but by a
despicable fraternity of minions, actors, and debauchees.