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.
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