Like that of Cicero, Seneca’s was no adamantine soul, no unyielding barrier against which the vices of his time beat in vain. He had the Roman liking for what is practical. He tried to be a statesman and was somewhat of a courtier when to be a courtier and an upright man was impossible. He was no Socrates to whom virtue, the fundamentally and intrinsically right, was more important than anything else, than all else, even abstention from the political turmoil of his time.
When a long and acrimonious strife is carried on over a man it is evidence that he is no ordinary person. This has been the fate of Seneca in an eminent degree. During the Middle Ages, and even after their close, a great deal of attention was paid to his reputed correspondence with St. Paul. The National Library in Paris contains more than sixty MSS. of this pseudo-correspondence. That he was claimed as a Christian need surprise no one. The poet Virgil shared a similar fate; yet there is far less in the writings of Virgil to mark him a Christian, or rather as a writer who was in a sense divinely inspired, than there is in Seneca to stamp him as a man who had accepted the new faith. The rise and persistence of such a literature is not an anomaly in the history of thought. It is not out of harmony with the spirit of an age when the church was supreme in everything; when all questions were viewed from the theological standpoint, and when every means were employed to gain support for the existing ecclesiastical organization. It was honestly believed that the practice or profession of a high morality, except under the sanction and guidance of the church, was impossible. It was taken as a matter of course, that a good man, one who eloquently preached righteousness, who seemed to be conscious of a struggle within himself between the flesh[2] and the spirit, must have been enlightened from on high. Given the internal evidence of Seneca’s own writings, it was not difficult to supply the complementary external testimony.