Читать книгу The Empresses of Rome онлайн

85 страница из 103

That the charge against Livilla was malignant cannot be doubted when we learn that her lover was said to be the famous Stoic moralist, Seneca. The disease of Rome had already evoked a natural remedy. The austere code of morals which Zeno had formulated some centuries earlier in the marble colonnade at Athens was now adopted by the best of the Romans. Pointing to the enfeeblement and degradation which this epidemic of Eastern vice and luxury had brought on their city, the philosophers argued that the curb must be placed once more on sensual impulse, and the old virility of Rome restored. Seneca was the most distinguished representative of this growing school at Rome, and, ambiguous or even reprehensible as his conduct may seem to us at a later stage, we should in this case prefer to attribute his punishment to the known vice of Messalina rather than to a frailty on his part of which we have no indication. The wise and just counsel that he gave to Claudius was probably distasteful to Messalina and the freedmen. Without trial or defence he was banished to Corsica. It is sometimes said that, as Seneca nowhere impeaches the virtue of Messalina, we may distrust the charge of vice against her which we find in all the later chroniclers; but Seneca also fails to refer to her greater and quite indisputable misdeeds, so that the omission has no significance. Seneca remained in exile six years, and had no more personal knowledge than Suetonius of the debauches of Messalina.