Some of his sentiments are so remarkable for their moral beauty and profundity that they forcibly remind us of the expressions of St.Paul.But Seneca fell infinitely short of his own high standard, and has contemptuously been called "the father of all them that wear shovel hats." Inconsistency is written on the entire history of his life, and it has earned him the scathing contempt with which many writers have treated his memory.

"The business of a philosopher," says Lord Macaulay, in his most scornful strain, "was to declaim in praise of poverty, with two millions sterling out at usury; to meditate epigrammatic conceits about the evils of luxury in gardens which moved the envy of sovereigns; to rant about liberty while fawning on the insolent and pampered freedmen of a tyrant; to celebrate the divine beauty of virtue with the same pen which had just before written a defence of the murder of a mother by a son." "Seneca," says Niebuhr, "was an accomplished man of the world, who occupied himself very much with virtue, and may have considered himself to be an ancient Stoic.

He certainly believed that he was a most ingenious and virtuous philosopher; but he acted on the principle that, as far as he himself was concerned, he could dispense with the laws of morality which he laid down for others, and that he might give way to his natural propensities." In Seneca's life, then, we see as clearly as in those of many professing Christians that it is impossible to be at once worldly and righteous.
Seneca's utter failure was due to the vain attempt to combine in his own person two opposite characters--that of a Stoic and that of a courtier.
Had he been a true philosopher, or a mere courtier, he would have been happier, and even more respected.

To be both was absurd: hence, even in his writings, he was driven into inconsistency.

He is often compelled to abandon the lofty utterances of Stoicism, and to charge philosophers with ignorance of life.