It is little wonder that on such lives an utter weariness should settle, the disgust of oversated appetite, which even the most far-fetched luxuries of the orient, the most devilish ingenuity of morbid vice, could hardly arouse. Yet these jaded souls are tortured by an aimless restlessness, which frets and chafes at the slow passing of the hours,(46) or vainly hopes to find relief in change of scene.(47) The more energetic spirits, with no wholesome field for energy, developed into a class which obtained the name of “Ardeliones.” Seneca,(48) Martial,(49) and the younger Pliny(50) have left us pictures of these idle busybodies, hurrying round the forums, theatres, and great houses, in an idle quest of some trivial object of interest, waiting on patrons who ignore their existence, following some stranger to the grave, rushing pell-mell to the wedding of a much-married lady, or to a scene in the law courts, returning at nightfall, worn out with these silly labours, to tread the same weary round next day. Less innocent were they who daily gathered in the _circuli_,(51) to hear and spread the wildest rumours about the army on the frontier, to kill a woman’s reputation with a hint, to find a sinister meaning in some imperial order, or to gloat in whispers over the last highly-coloured tale of folly or dark guilt from the palace. It was a perilous enjoyment, for, with a smiling face, some seeming friend was probably noting every hint which might be tortured into an accusation before the secret tribunal on the Palatine, or angling for a sneer which might cost its author a fortune, or send him to the rocks of Gyarus.
In reading Seneca’s writings, especially those of his last years, you are conscious of a horror which hardly ever takes definite shape, a thick stifling air, as it were, charged with lightning. Again and again, you feel a dim terror closing in silently and stealthily, with sudden glimpses of unutterable torture, of cord and rack and flaming tunic.(52) You seem to see the sage tossing on his couch of purple under richly panelled ceilings of gold, starting at every sound in the wainscot,(53) as he awaits the messenger of death. It is not so much that Seneca fears death itself, although we may suspect that his nerves sometimes gave the lie to his principles. He often hails death as welcome at any age, as the deliverer who strikes off the chain and opens the prison door, the one harbour on a tempestuous and treacherous sea.(54) He is grateful for having always open this escape from life’s long torture, and boldly claims the right to anticipate the executioner. The gloom of Seneca seems rather to spring from a sense of the terrible contrast between wealth and state and an ignominious doom which was ever ready to fall. And to his fevered eye all stately rank seems at last but a precipice overhanging the abyss, a mark for treacherous envy or the spitefulness of Fortune.(55) “A great fortune is a great servitude,”(56) which, if it has been hard to win, is harder still to guard. And all life is full of these pathetic contrasts. Pleasure is nearest neighbour to pain; the summer sea in a moment is boiling in the tempest; the labour of long years is scattered in a day; there is always terror lurking under our deepest peace. And so we reach the sad gospel of a universal pessimism; “nothing is so deceitful and treacherous as the life of man.”(57) No one would knowingly accept such a fatal gift, of which the best that can be said is that the torture is short, that our first moment of existence is the first stage to the grave.(58) Thus to Seneca, with all his theoretical indifference to things external to the virtuous will, with all his admiration for the invulnerable wisdom, withdrawn in the inner citadel of the soul, and defying the worst that tyrants or fortune could inflict, the _taedium vitae_ became almost unendurable. The interest of all this lies, not in Seneca’s inconsistency, but in the nightmare which brooded on such minds in the reign of Nero.