Seneca - College of Stoic Philosophers

40 SENECAthat it was capable of giving such pleasure.Claudius — iscomplimented on the excellence of hismemory Claudius who inquired when Messalinawas coming to dinner on the day after her execution^ ; Polybiusis assured that he is on a level withHomer and Virgil, and that if he celebrates theacts of the emperor, in whose super-excellence hemay find at once material for his history and aperfect model for historical composition, his workwill be read by the latest posterity.All the serious works of Seneca abound withlofty and striking thoughts so happily expressedthat they stamp themselves upon the mind.Scarce any writer has been more often quotedwith or without acknowledgment, or more deservesquotation, than he of whose treatises it has beensaid by one of the best of English critics that intheir combination of high thought with deepfeeling they have rarely, if ever, been surpassed.But high thought and deep feeling and moral'dignity are alike absent from the Consolation toPolybius.' There is hardly a sentence in it worthyof quotation. The sentiment iscommonplacewhere it is not affected. The writer observes^Consol. ad Pol. xxxiii. : 'Tenacissiraa memoria retulit.* Atfirst sight it seems incredible that Seneca could have written thisexcept in conscious mockery, on which an unlimited faith in theemperor's dullness of apprehension could alone have emboldenedhim to venture. Even the flatterers of Louis XIV did not speakof his frugality or humility, nor would it have served them to doso. Flattery to gain its end must rest, however superficially, onsome foundation of fact. But the learned Claudius may reallyhave had a good verbal memory, often to be found in combinationwith the forgetfulness that comes from want of interest orattention