ostentatiously glorified. Yet in the midst of all these circumstances
the Stoics taught a philosophy which was not a compromise, not an
attempt to moderate the popular excesses, but which in its austere
sanctity was the extreme antithesis of all that the prevailing examples
and their own interests could dictate. And these men were no impassioned
fanatics, fired with the prospect of coming glory. They were men from
whose motives of action the belief in the immortality of the soul was
resolutely excluded. In the scepticism that accompanied the first
introduction of philosophy into Rome, in the dissolution of the old
fables about Tartarus and the Styx, and the dissemination of
Epicureanism among the people, this doctrine, notwithstanding the
beautiful reasonings of Cicero and the religious faith of a few who
clung like Plutarch to the mysteries in which it was perpetuated, had
sunk very low. An interlocutor in Cicero expressed what was probably a
common feeling, when he acknowledged that, with the writings of Plato
before him, he could believe and realise it; but when he closed the
book, the reasonings seemed to lose their power, and the world of
spirits grew pale and unreal. If Ennius could elicit the plaudits of a
theatre when he proclaimed that the gods took no part in human affairs,
Caesar could assert in the senate, without scandal and almost without
dissent, that death was the end of all things. Pliny, perhaps the
greatest of all the Roman scholars, adopting the sentiment of all the
school of Epicurus, describes the belief in a future life as a form of
madness, a puerile and a pernicious illusion. The opinions of the Stoics
were wavering and uncertain. Their first doctrine was that the soul of
man has a future and independent, but not an eternal existence, that it
survives until the conflagration that was to destroy the world when all
finite things would be absorbed in the all-pervading soul of nature.
Chrysippus, however, restricted to the best and noblest souls this
future existence, which Cleanthes had awarded to all, and among the