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On the banks of the Baetis--the modern Guadalquiver,--and under the woods that crown the southern slopes of the Sierra Morena, lies the beautiful and famous city of Cordova. It had been selected by Marcellus as the site of a Roman colony; and so many Romans and Spaniards of high rank chose it for their residence, that it obtained from Augustus the honourable surname of the "Patrician Colony." Spain, during this period of the Empire, exercised no small influence upon the literature and politics of Rome. No less than three great Emperors--Trajan, Hadrian, and Theodosius,--were natives of Spain. Columella, the writer on agriculture, was born at Cadiz; Quintilian, the great writer on the education of an orator, was born at Calahorra; the poet Martial was a native of Bilbilis; but Cordova could boast the yet higher honour of having given birth to the Senecas, an honour which won for it the epithet of "The Eloquent." A ruin is shown to modern travellers which is popularly called the House of Seneca, and the fact is at least a proof that the city still retains some memory of its illustrious sons.

Marcus Annaeus Seneca, the father of the philosopher, was by rank a Roman knight. What causes had led him or his family to settle in Spain we do not know, and the names Annaeus and Seneca are alike obscure. It has been vaguely conjectured that both names may involve an allusion to the longevity of some of the founders of the family, for Annaeus seems to be connected with annus, a year, and Seneca with senex, an old man. The common English composite plant ragwort is called senecio from the white and feathery pappus or appendage of its seeds; and similarly, Isidore says that the first Seneca was so named because "he was born with white hair."

Although the father of Seneca was of knightly rank, his family had never risen to any eminence; it belonged to the class of nouveaux riches, and we do not know whether it was of Roman or of Spanish descent. But his mother Helvia--an uncommon name, which, by a curious coincidence, belonged also to the mother of Cicero--was a Spanish lady; and it was from her that Seneca, as well as his famous nephew, the poet Lucan, doubtless derived many of the traits which mark their intellect and their character. There was in the Spaniard a richness and splendour of imagination, an intensity and warmth, a touch of "phantasy and flame," which we find in these two men of genius, and which was wholly wanting to the Roman temperament.

Of Cordova itself, except in a single epigram, Seneca makes no mention; but this epigram suffices to show that he must have been familiar with its stirring and memorable traditions. The elder Seneca must have been living at Cordova during all the troublous years of civil war, when his native city caused equal offence to Pompey and to Caesar. Doubtless, too, he would have had stories to tell of the noble Sertorius, and of the tame fawn which gained for him the credit of divine assistance; and contemporary reminiscences of that day of desperate disaster when Caesar, indignant that Cordova should have embraced the cause of the sons of Pompey, avenged himself by a massacre of 22,000 of the citizens. From his mother Helvia, Seneca must often have heard about the fierce and gallant struggle in which her country had resisted the iron yoke of Rome. Many a time as a boy must he have been told how long and how heroically Saguntum had withstood the assaults and baffled the triumph of Hannibal; how bravely Viriathus had fought, and how shamefully he fell; and how at length the unequal contest, which reduced Spain to the condition of a province, was closed, when the heroic defenders of Numantia, rather than yield to Scipio, reduced their city to a heap of blood-stained ruins.

But, whatever may have been the extent to which Seneca was influenced by the Spanish blood which flowed in his veins, and the Spanish legends on which his youth was fed, it was not in Spain that his lot was cast. When he was yet an infant in arms his father, with all his family, emigrated from Cordova to Rome. What may have been the special reason for this important step we do not know; possibly, like the father of Horace, the elder Seneca may have sought a better education for his sons than could be provided by even so celebrated a provincial town as Cordova; possibly--for he belonged to a somewhat pushing family--he may have desired to gain fresh wealth and honour in the imperial city.

Thither we must follow him; and, as it is our object not only to depict a character but also to sketch the characteristics of a very memorable age in the world's history, we must try to get a glimpse of the family in the midst of which our young philosopher grew up, of the kind of education which he received, and of the influences which were likely to tell upon him during his childish and youthful years. Only by such means shall we be able to judge of him aright. And it is worth while to try and gain a right conception of the man, not only because he was very eminent as a poet, an author, and a politician, not only because he fills a very prominent place in the pages of the great historian, who has drawn so immortal a picture of Rome under the Emperors; not only because in him we can best study the inevitable signs which mark, even in the works of men of genius, a degraded people and a decaying literature; but because he was, as the title of this volume designates him, a "SEEKER AFTER GOD." Whatever may have been the dark and questionable actions of his life--and in this narrative we shall endeavor to furnish a plain and unvarnished picture of the manner in which he lived,--it is certain that, as a philosopher and as a moralist, he furnishes us with the grandest and most eloquent series of truths to which, unilluminated by Christianity, the thoughts of man have ever attained. The purest and most exalted philosophic sect of antiquity was "the sect of the Stoics;" and Stoicism never found a literary exponent more ardent, more eloquent, or more enlightened than Lucius Annaeus Seneca. So nearly, in fact, does he seem to have arrived at the truths of Christianity, that to many it seemed a matter for marvel that he could have known them without having heard them from inspired lips. He is constantly cited with approbation by some of the most eminent Christian fathers. Tertullian, Lactantius, even St. Augustine himself, quote his words with marked admiration, and St. Jerome appeals to him as "our Seneca." The Council of Trent go further still, and quote him as though he were an acknowledged father of the Church. For many centuries there were some who accepted as genuine the spurious letters supposed to have been interchanged between Seneca and St. Paul, in which Seneca is made to express a wish to hold among the Pagans the same beneficial position which St. Paul held in the Christian world. The possibility of such an intercourse, the nature and extent of such supposed obligations, will come under our consideration hereafter. All that I here desire to say is, that in considering the life of Seneca we are not only dealing with a life which was rich in memorable incidents, and which was cast into an age upon which Christianity dawned as a new light in the darkness, but also the life of one who climbed the loftiest peaks of the moral philosophy of Paganism, and who in many respects may be regarded as the Coryphaeus of what has been sometimes called a Natural Religion.

It is not my purpose to turn aside from the narrative in order to indulge in moral reflections, because such reflections will come with tenfold force if they are naturally suggested to the reader's mind by the circumstances of the biography. But from first to last it will be abundantly obvious to every thoughtful mind that alike the morality and the philosophy of Paganism, as contrasted with the splendour of revealed truth and the holiness of Christian life, are but as moonlight is to sunlight. The Stoical philosophy may be compared to a torch which flings a faint gleam here and there in the dusky recesses of a mighty cavern; Christianity to the sun pouring into the inmost depths of the same cavern its sevenfold illumination. The torch had a value and brightness of its own, but compared with the dawning of that new glory it appears to be dim and ineffectual, even though its brightness was a real brightness, and had been drawn from the same etherial source.