Seneca - College of Stoic Philosophers

12 SENECAOriginal minds may not force their ideas into anancient mould on pain of illustrating the coupletof Boileau :'Voulant se redresser soi-meme on s'estropie,Et d'un original devient une copie.'When, however, we compare the graceful, easyflowingstyle of Livy, Cicero, and Virgil, theiravoidance of over-emphasis or abrupt transitions,the rise and fall of their periods, andthe even texture of their narrative, comparableto a good mountain road, which is neverirksome to a traveller whatever the height towhich it rises— when we compare this with thebold realism, the disregard for convention andtradition, the cosmopolitanism, and the strikingbut often isolated thoughts and aphorisms ofLucan and Tacitus and Juvenal, we can understandthe extreme dislike which such admirersof antiquity in later generations as Quintilianor Aulus Gellius or Pronto felt for the youngerSeneca, whom they rightly regarded as thechief author of this revolution in taste. Thetransition resembles, both in its nature and inthe circumstance of the intervening revolution,that from the French encyclopaedists of theeighteenth century toChateaubriand and VictorHugo — a transition deplored by Sainte-Beuve,who might be called the Quintilian of the nineteenthcentury.