The Epistles of Lucius Annaeus Seneca

You call Tully Marcus Tullius Cicero. names to revenge Cato's quarrel. I am ready to fall foul on Seneca. You churchmen have praised him as a great saint; and, as if you still imagined that to have it believed he had a mind to be a Christian would reflect some honor on Christianity, you employed one of those pious frauds so frequently practiced in the days of primitive simplicity to impose upon the world a pretended correspondence between him and the great Apostle of the Gentiles A collection of thirteen letters that seemed to Jerome, Augustine, and before them to Pope Linus, to be genuine. John of Salisbury was bolder: "They seem to me to be very silly, who reverence not the man that was thought worthy of apostolic converse." But Du Pin acknowledges that the letters now presented under this character contain nothing worthy of the Apostle or the Philosopher, and have not the least resemblance to the style of either. This is likewise the judgment of the most learned among the modern critics. However, I propose to provide a translation of them for the satisfaction of the curious reader.. Your partiality in his favor shall bias me no more than the pique that Dion Cassius and others show against him. Like an equitable judge, I shall only tax him with avarice in his prosperity, adulation in adversity, and affectation in every state of life. So in Letter 14: "The founder of your sect, that noble original, whom you think it so great an honor to resemble (Seneca), was a slave to the worst part of the world, the court. And all his big words were the language of a flighted lover, who desired nothing so much as a reconciliation, and feared nothing so much as a rupture." This, I think, is going a little too far at the distance of near 2,000 years from the time of Seneca. And I was not a little pleased to find a charge of this kind so judiciously answered by the learned Lipsius. Was I important enough to be banished from my country, His Lordship certainly was important enough to be, at least, self-banished for some years, which were eminently employed by those who can distinguish the grain from the chaff, and are candid enough to impute the latter to an unhappy prejudice and partiality contracted in a country notorious for Voltairism and levity. I think I would not purchase my restoration at the expense of writing such a letter to the Prince himself as your Christian Stoic wrote to the Emperor’s slave, Polybius. This treatise is suspected by Lipsius. And if it be genuine, he says, "I am so much ashamed of it as to declare that whoever published it was no friend to Seneca or his honor." Thus I think of the man, and yet I read the author with...