Another Pythagorean philosopher whom he admired and whom he quotes was
Sextius, from whom he learnt the admirable practice of daily
self-examination:--"When the day was over, and he betook himself to his
nightly rest, he used to ask himself, What evil have you cured to day?
What vice have you resisted? In what particular have you improved?" "I
too adopt this custom," says Seneca, in his book on Anger, "and I daily
plead my cause before myself, when the light has been taken away, and my
wife, who is now aware of my habit, has become silent; I carefully
consider in my heart the entire day, and take a deliberate estimate of
my deeds and words."

It was however the Stoic Attalus who seems to have had the main share in
the instruction of Seneca; and _his_ teaching did not involve any
practical results which the elder Seneca considered objectionable. He
tells us how he used to haunt the school of the eloquent philosopher,
being the first to enter and the last to leave it. "When I heard him
declaiming," he says, "against vice, and error, and the ills of life, I
often felt compassion for the human race, and believed my teacher to be
exalted above the ordinary stature of mankind. In Stoic fashion he used
to call himself a king; but to me his sovereignty seemed more than
royal, seeing that it was in his power to pass his judgments on kings
themselves. When he began to set forth the praises of poverty, and to
show how heavy and superfluous was the burden of all that exceeded the
ordinary wants of life, I often longed to leave school a poor man. When
he began to reprehend our pleasures, to praise a chaste body, a moderate
table, and a mind pure not from all unlawful but even from all
superfluous pleasures, it was my delight to set strict limits to all
voracity and gluttony. And these precepts, my Lucilius, have left some
permanent results; for I embraced them with impetuous eagerness, and