Seneca, had he lived, would have appreciated the irony: his wayward pupil, in the end, became a student of his hardest lesson. The questions of when and how to die had preoccupied Seneca in his last years. Seneca too had stored up poison, the means to a clean, quiet end, but in the event he had preferred the blade and the shedding of blood. Even that had not killed him, but Seneca had suffered in death, a point he considered crucial. It was what set Cato, Seneca’s great moral hero, apart from ordinary men.
