Section 28: The Inner Value of Philosophy explained simply

XXVIII. This you do not understand, and you bear a countenance which does not befit your condition, like many men who sit in the circus or the theatre without having learned that their home is already in mourning: but I, looking forward from a lofty standpoint, can see what storms are either threatening you, and will burst in torrents upon you somewhat later, or are close upon you and on the point of sweeping away all that you possess. Why, though you are hardly aware of it, is there not a whirling hurricane at this moment spinning round and confusing your minds, making them seek and avoid the very same things, now raising them aloft and now dashing them below? . . . . . .” Lipsius’s conjecture, “those who are dressed in white as well as those who are dressed in coloured clothes,’ alluding to the white robes of candidates for office, seems reasonable. The Latin words are literally “to divide” their vote, that is, “to separate things of different kinds comprised in a single vote so that they might be voted for separately.”—Andrews. Séneque fait allusion ici à une coutume pratiquée dans les assemblées du Sénat; et il nous I’explique lui-même ailleurs d’un manière très claire: “Si quelqu’un dans le Sénat,” dit il, “ouvre un avis, dont une partie me convienne, je le somme de la detacher du reste, et j’y adhère.”—Ep. 21, La Grange. Parentatur seems to mean where an offering is made to luxury— where they sacrifice to luxury. Perfumes were used at funerals. Lipsius suggests that these feasts were like funerals because the guests were carried away from them dead drunk. The quotation is from the epitaph on Phaeton.—See Ovid, Met. II, 327. The “Pons Sublicius,” or “pile bridge,” was built over the Tiber by Ancus Martius, one of the early kings of Rome, and was always kept in repair out of a superstitious feeling. Sistrum. A metallic rattle used by the Egyptians in celebrating the rites of Isis, &c.—Andrews. THE EIGHTH BOOK OF THE DIALOGUES OF L. ANNAEUS SENECA, ADDRESSED TO SERENUS.