Seneca - College of Stoic Philosophers

i8oSENECAon conventional lines, was one of the best criticsthat have ever passed judgment on the worksof others— the Sainte-Beuve of his age. ButSeneca was in literature a revolutionary, with adislike of convention, scant respect for tradition,and impatience of authority ^ and; Quintilian,the classicist, was of opinion that he owed his— popularity not to his good qualities the ' multaeetmagnae virtutes ' which he freely recognised—but to his dangerously attractive faults — hisrhetoric and his detached sentences, good, bad,and indifferent, not woven according to the rulesof art into the texture of a complete work, butscattered in careless profusion as they occurredto him and lying where theyfell. For Romanconservatives such as Quintilian, Roman citizenshipwas a primary consideration, and for a Romancitizen moral obligations were in large measureconfined to their relations with their fellowcitizens.For Seneca, on the other hand, and hisschool, man was sacred to man as man ^— the idea ofcitizenship with its rights and duties was swallowedup and lost in that of humanity, all men werebrothers and sprang from the same origin.^ Themost useful life a man could lead was spent inhelping, teaching, and consoling his fellow-men— be they Romans or barbarians, free or slave.The maxims in which Seneca enshrined thesenotions seemed to Quintilian rhetorical commonplacecalculated to please children and of a sub-1Ep. 33 'Non sumus sub rege, sibi quisque se vindicet.':*Ep. 95 'Homo res sacra ho mini.':»Deus est mortaliCp. his contemporary, Pliny, ii. '7 :juvare mortalem ' ;and St- Paul passim.