life, his Spanish extraction (like that of Lacan and Martial), his
father's treatises on Rhetoric, his mother Helvia, his brothers,
his wealth, his exile in Corsica, his outrageous flattery of
Claudius and his satiric poem on his death--"The Vision of
Judgment," Merivale calls it, after Lord Byron--his position as
Nero's tutor, and his death, worthy at once of a Roman and a Stoic,
by the orders of that tyrant, may be read of in "The History of the
Romans under the Empire," or in the article "Seneca" in the
"Dictionary of Classical Biography," and need not be reproduced
here: but I cannot resist pointing out how entirely Grote's view of
the "Sophists" as a sort of established clergy, and Seneca's
account of the various sects of philosophers as representing the
religious thought of the time, is illustrated by his anecdote of
Julia Augusta, the mother of Tiberius, better known to English
readers as Livia the wife of Augustus, who in her first agony of
grief at the loss of her first husband applied to his Greek
philosopher, Areus, as to a kind of domestic chaplain, for
spiritual consolation. ("Ad Marciam de Consolatione," ch. iv.)

I take this opportunity of expressing my gratitude to the Rev. J.
E. B. Mayor, Professor of Latin in the University of Cambridge, for
his kindness in finding time among his many and important literary
labours for reading and correcting the proofs of this work.

The text which I have followed for De Beneficiis is that of Gertz,
Berlin (1876.).

AUBREY STEWART

London, March, 1887.