Seneca - College of Stoic Philosophers

130 SENECAtreats his subject in a scientific and philosophicalspirit, discarding, not in silence Uke Lucan, butwith open contempt, all supernatural explanationsof the phenomena. The poets, he tells us, vainlyimagined the pallid kingdom of Pluto beneaththe ashes, the waters of Styx with Cerberus, thegiant Tityos spread over seven acres, Tantaluswith his eternal thirst foiled by the retreatingwater, Ixion and the wheel, Minos and his judgments.Not content with this they pry intothe manners of the gods, and picture them fullof worse than human lusts and passions. Butas for me, he continues, ' truth is my only care.'Seneca says the same thing in prose :Remember [he says to Marcia]that evil exists notfor the dead. All those tales of infernal regions arefables invented to terrify us. For the dead there isneither darkness nor prison, nor rivers of fire, nor Lethe,nor tribunals, nor accused. In that free state there areno fresh tyrants. These things are the fond imaginationsof poets who delude us into emptyfears. Deathis alike the reward and the end of all pain ; beyonditour sufferings cannot extend ;it replaces us in thatstate of perfect tranquillity which was ours before wewere born. If we pity the dead, we should pity thoseunborn.And again, in the treatise De Vita Beata hespeaks of the — folly of poets who impute every viceto Jupiter making him a parricide, a usurper,and a seducer. Their motive must be, he says,men by such examples from any senseto relieveof guiltin their own actions.^1Beata, 26.Aetna, 72-89 ; Seneca, Cons, ad Marc. 19: DeVita