Seneca was an ideal director for the upper class of such an age. He had risen to the highest office in a world-wide monarchy, and he had spent years in hourly fear of death. He had enjoyed the society of the most brilliant circles, and exchanged epigrams and repartees with the best; he had also seen them steeped in debauchery and treachery, and terror-stricken in base compliance. He had witnessed their fantastic efforts of luxury and self-indulgence, and heard the tale of wearied sensualism and disordered ambition and ineffectual lives.(1608) His disciples were drawn, if not from the noblest class, at any rate from the class which had felt the disillusionment of wealth and fashion and power. And the vicissitudes in his own fate and character made him a powerful and sympathetic adviser. He had long to endure the torturing contrast of splendid rank and wealth, with the brooding terror of a doom which might sweep down at any moment. He was also tortured by other contrasts, some drawn by the fierceness of envious hatred, others perhaps acknowledged by conscience. Steeped in the doctrines of Chrysippus and Pythagoras, he had subdued the ebullient passions of youth by a more than monastic asceticism.(1609) He had passionately adopted an ethical creed which aimed at a radical reform of human nature, at the triumph of cultivated and moralised reason and social sympathy over the brutal materialism and selfishness of the age. He had pondered on its doctrines of the higher life, of the nothingness of the things of sense, on death, and the indwelling God assisting the struggling soul, on the final happy release from all the sordid misery and terror, until every earthly pleasure and ambition faded away in the presence of a glorious moral ideal.(1610) And yet this pagan monk, this idealist, who would have been at home with S. Jerome or Thomas à Kempis, had accumulated a vast fortune, and lived in a palace which excited the envy of a Nero. He was suspected of having been the lover of two princesses of the imperial house.(1611) He was charged with having connived at, or encouraged the excesses of Nero, and even of having been an accomplice in the murder of Agrippina, or its apologist.(1612) Some of these rumours are probably false, the work of prurient imaginations in the most abandoned age in history. Yet there are traces in Seneca’s writings that he had not passed unscathed through the terrible ordeal to which character was exposed in that age. There are pictures of voluptuous ease and jaded satiety which may be the work of a keen sympathetic observation, but which may also be the expression of repentant memory.(1613) In any case, he had sounded the very depths of the moral abysses of his time. He had no illusions about the actual condition of human nature. The mass of men, all but a few naturally saintly souls, were abandoned to lust or greed or selfish ambition. Human life was an obscene and cruel struggle of wild beasts for the doles flung by fortune into the arena.(1614) The peace and happiness of the early Eden have departed for ever, leaving men to the restlessness of exhausted appetite, or to the half-repentant sense of impotent lives, spent in pursuing the phantoms of imaginary pleasure, with broken glimpses now and then of a world for ever lost.(1615) With such a scene about him in his declining years, whatever his own practice may have been, Seneca came to feel an evangelistic passion, almost approaching S. Paul’s, to open to these sick perishing souls the vision of a higher life through the practical discipline of philosophy.