victim.[140] But though oratory provided Seneca with the readiest means
for the gratification of his not inconsiderable vanity, and for the
exercise of his marvellous powers of wit and epigram, it was not the
pursuit of rhetoric and its prizes that really held the first place in
his heart. That place was claimed by philosophy. His first love was
Pythagoreanism, which he studied under Sotion[14l] of Alexandria, whose
influence was sufficient to induce his youthful pupil to become a
convinced vegetarian. But his father, who hated fads and philosophers,
persuaded Seneca without much difficulty to 'dine better', and the
doctrines of Pythagoras were soon displaced by the more fashionable
teaching of the Stoics. From the lips of Attalus[142] he learned all the
principles of that ascetic school. 'I besieged his class-room,' he
writes; 'I was the first to come, the last to go; I would waylay him
when out walking and lead him to discuss serious problems.' Whether he
denounced vice and luxury, or extolled poverty, Attalus found a
convinced disciple in Seneca. His convictions did not possess sufficient
weight to lead him to embrace a life of austere poverty, but he at least
learned to sleep on a hard mattress, and to eschew hot baths, wine,
unguents, oysters, and mushrooms. How far his life conformed to the
highest principles of his creed, it is hard to say. If we are to believe
his detractors, he was guilty of committing adultery with the Princess
Julia Livilla, was surrounded with all the luxuries that the age could
supply, and drained the life-blood of Italy and the provinces by
extortionate usury.[143] During his long exile in Corsica he could write
a consolatory treatise to his mother on the thesis that the true
philosopher is never an exile;[144] wherever he is, there he is at home;
but little more than a year later he writes another consolatory treatise
to the imperial freedman Polybius, full of the most grovelling flattery
of Polybius himself and of the Emperor Claudius,[145] the same Claudius
whom he afterwards bespattered with the coarse, if occasionally