Seneca - College of Stoic Philosophers

92 SENECAhe proceeded to an indictment of the whole ofhis mother's career. He dwelt on the atrocitiesof the reign of Claudius, and insinuated her responsibilityfor them he; recalled her ambitionto be his colleague in the Empire and to receivein his company the oath of allegiance and;asserted that on her failure to achieve this objectshe had opposedall donatives to soldiers or people.He was obliged, he added, to recognise, howevergreat his natural grief for her loss might be,that her death was a public benefit.^ The letterdeceived nobody. No one could believe thatthe wreck was an accident or that Agrippinawould have been mad enough to send a singleindividual to attack the emperor in the midst ofhis guards. The character of Nero was alreadyso well known that no fresh infamy on his partcould any longer cause surprise but the compositionof the letter by Seneca was the subject ;ofhostile criticism, and was not only regarded at thetime by his enemies as an avowal of complicityin the murder, but has weighed more heavily onother incidenthis memory ever since than anyin his career. Yet that Seneca and Burrhus werethe accomplices or advisers of Nero's plot tomurder his mother is in a high degree improbable;it is unlike all we know of their characters ;and, as the event proved, such advice would have^In this letter occurred the ingenious phrase afterwardsquoted by QuintiUan as an example of a form of the senientia :'Facit quasdam sententias sola geminatio qualis est Senecae:in eo scripto quod Nero ad Senatum misit occisa matre, cum se" Salvum me esse adhuc nee credopericlitatum videri vellet :nee gaudeo " ' (Quint, viii. 5),