Seneca - College of Stoic Philosophers

78 SENECAmost powerful statesman was atthe same timethe most admired writer of the day. His speeches,treatises, and poetry were in everybody's hands.The rising generation, says Quintihan, wouldscarcely read any other author,* and the concoctionof epigrams and aphorisms (sententiae) afterhis manner became the literary fashion.His nephew Lucan, son of the prudent Mela,was the most brilliant of the poets of the newschool. After other more conventional essaysin poetry he published, while still under twentyfiveyears of age, the first part of an epic poemon the civil wars, written on a completely new plan.Boldly discarding the whole of the supernaturalmachinery of Olympus, considered ever since thedays of Homer an indispensable adjunct to anepic, he described events and characters withwhat historical accuracy his researches couldsupply. He had no respect for remote antiquity—^—'famosa vetustas miratrixque stn ' the stirringscenes of the century which preceded his ownoffered material enough for his rushing, impetuousrhetoric. Why blunt its force and lose all theinterest attaching to the connection betweencharacter and events by invoking the interpositionof shadowy beings in whom his readershad ceased to believe ?Keenly interested inthe world as itappeared to him amid the strifeof men, and a violent partisan, he was, like Byron,of too passionate a nature, and lived too muchin the present to find time for subjective musings,^Quint. X. I 'Turn autem solus hie fere in manibus:*adolescentium fuit.'Phars. iv. 654-5.