At first the abstinence from meat was painful, but after a year he tells us (and many vegetarians will confirm his experience) it was not only easy but delightful; and he used to believe, though he would not assert it as a fact, that it made his intellect more keen and active.

He only ceased to be a vegetarian in obedience to the remonstrance of his unphilosophical father, who would have easily tolerated what he regarded as a mere vagary had it not involved the danger of giving rise to a calumny.

For about this time Tiberius banished from Rome all the followers of strange and foreign religions; and, as fasting was one of the rites practiced in some of them, Seneca's father thought that perhaps his son might incur, by abstaining from meat, the horrible suspicion of being a Christian or a Jew! Another Pythagorean philosopher whom he admired and whom he quotes was Sextius, from whom he learnt the admirable practice of daily self-examination:--"When the day was over, and he betook himself to his nightly rest, he used to ask himself, What evil have you cured to day?
What vice have you resisted?
In what particular have you improved ?" "I too adopt this custom," says Seneca, in his book on Anger, "and I daily plead my cause before myself, when the light has been taken away, and my wife, who is now aware of my habit, has become silent; I carefully consider in my heart the entire day, and take a deliberate estimate of my deeds and words." It was however the Stoic Attalus who seems to have had the main share in the instruction of Seneca; and _his_ teaching did not involve any practical results which the elder Seneca considered objectionable.

He tells us how he used to haunt the school of the eloquent philosopher, being the first to enter and the last to leave it.

"When I heard him declaiming," he says, "against vice, and error, and the ills of life, I often felt compassion for the human race, and believed my teacher to be exalted above the ordinary stature of mankind.