Seneca - College of Stoic Philosophers

64 SENECABut he had to choose between resistance to thepower of the empress and the abandonmentof his projects of reform, and it isby no meansclear that he ought to have chosen the latter.In his treatise De Beneficiis he says that if aman has received favours from a tyrant he oughtto repay him with what benefits he can, so longas he can do so without injury to others.^ Tohave supported the cruel and corrupt influenceof Agrippina would have been signally to haveviolated this condition ;while if he had retiredfrom public life, deserted Burrhus, and surrenderedhis opportunities of serving the State, he wouldnone the less have been accused of ingratitudeby Agrippina, who had counted on his activesupport.At all events the prosperity of the first fiveyears of the reign of Nero, the famous quinqiiennmmNeronis, during which the emperor,abandoning himself to his pleasures, left the wholebusiness of the State to Seneca and Burrhus,silenced for the time the detractors of thosestatesmen. The Emperor Trajan was afterwardswont to declare that this, in his judgment, wasthe period in which the Romans enjoyed thebest government under the Empire.^ Even themalicious historian Dion Cassius, enemy thoughhe was to Seneca's reputation, writes that thesestatesmen, once the full control of affairs hadfallen into their hands, exercised itwith a justice1 De Bene}, vii. 20.* 'Merito Trajanus saepius testatur procul differre cunctosprincipes Neronis quinquennio ' (Aurelius Victor, de Caesar, c. 5).