Nero showed the consciousness of guilt by the immense largesses which he distributed to the most powerful of his friends, "Nor were there wanting men," says Tacitus, in a most significant manner, "_who accused certain people, notorious for their high professions, of having at that period divided among them villas and houses as though they had been so much spoil_." There can hardly be a doubt that the great historian intends by this remark to point at Seneca, to whom he tries to be fair, but whom he could never quite forgive for his share in the disgraces of Nero's reign.

That avarice was one of Seneca's temptations is too probable; that expediency was a guiding principle of his conduct is but too evident; and for a man with such a character to rebut an innuendo is never an easy task.

Nay more, it was _after_ this foul event, at the close of Nero's first year, that Seneca addressed him in the extravagant and glowing language of his treatise on Clemency.

"The quality of mercy," and the duty of princes to practise it, has never been more eloquently extolled; but it is accompanied by a fulsome flattery which has in it something painfully grotesque as addressed by a philosopher to one whom he knew to have been guilty, that very year, of an inhuman fratricide.

Imagine some Jewish Pharisee,--a Nicodemus or a Gamaliel--pronouncing an eulogy on the tenderness of a Herod, and you have some picture of the appearance which Seneca's consistency must have worn in the eyes of his contemporaries.
This event took place A.D.55, in the first year of Nero's _Quinquennium_, and the same year was nearly signalized by the death of his mother.