Roman Stoics even this was greatly doubted. The belief that the human
soul is a detached fragment of the Deity, naturally led to the belief
that after death it would be reabsorbed in the parent Spirit. The
doctrine that there is no real good but virtue deprived the Stoics of
the argument for a future world derived from unrequited merit and
unpunished crimes, and the earnestness with which they contended that a
good man should act irrespectively of reward, inclined them, as it is
said to have inclined some Jewish thinkers, to the denial of the
existence of the reward. Panaetius, the founder of Roman stoicism,
maintained that the soul perished with the body, and his opinion was
followed by Epictetus and Cornutus. Seneca contradicted himself on the
subject. Marcus Aurelius never rose beyond a vague and mournful
aspiration. Those who believed in a future world believed it faintly and
uncertainly, and even when they accepted it as a fact, they shrank from
proposing it as a motive. The whole system of stoical ethics, which
carried self-sacrifice to a point that has scarcely been equalled, and
exercised an influence which has rarely been surpassed, was evolved
without any assistance from the doctrine of a future life. Pagan
antiquity has bequeathed us few nobler treatises of morals than the "De
Officiis" of Cicero, which was avowedly an expansion of a work of
Panaetius. It has left us no grander example than that of Epictetus, the
sickly, deformed slave of a master who was notorious for his barbarity,
enfrancished late in life, but soon driven into exile by Domitian, who,
while sounding the very abyss of human misery, and looking forward to
death as to simple decomposition, was yet so filled with the sense of
the Divine presence, that his life was one continued hymn to Providence,
and his writings and his example, which appeared to his contemporaries
almost the ideal of human goodness, have not lost their consoling power
through all the ages and the vicissitudes they have survived.