the preceding period the revolution generally was rather
preparing its way in men's minds than assuming outward shape, so
the religious revolution was in substance, at any rate, the work
only of the Gracchan and Sullan age.

Greek Philosophy

Let us endeavour first to trace the tendency associating itself
with Hellenism. The Hellenic nation, which bloomed and faded far
earlier than the Italian, had long ago passed the epoch of faith
and thenceforth moved exclusively in the sphere of speculation and
reflection; for long there had been no religion there--nothing but
philosophy. But even the philosophic activity of the Hellenic mind
had, when it began to exert influence on Rome, already left the
epoch of productive speculation far behind it, and had arrived at
the stage at which there is not only no origination of truly new
systems, but even the power of apprehending the more perfect of
the older systems begins to wane and men restrict themselves to the
repetition, soon passing into the scholastic tradition, of the less
complete dogmas of their predecessors; at that stage, accordingly,
when philosophy, instead of giving greater depth and freedom to
the mind, rather renders it shallow and imposes on it the worst of
all chains--chains of its own forging. The enchanted draught of
speculation, always dangerous, is, when diluted and stale, certain
poison. The contemporary Greeks presented it thus flat and diluted
to the Romans, and these had not the judgment either to refuse it
or to go back from the living schoolmasters to the dead masters.
Plato and Aristotle, to say nothing of the sages before Socrates,
remained without material influence on the Roman culture, although
their illustrious names were freely used, and their more easily
understood writings were probably read and translated. Accordingly
the Romans became in philosophy simply inferior scholars of bad
teachers.

Leading Schools
Newer Academy
Epicurus and Zeno

Besides the historico-rationalistic conception of religion, which
resolved the myths into biographies of various benefactors of the
human race living in the grey dawn of early times whom superstition
had transformed into gods, or Euhemerism as it was called,(8) there
were chiefly three philosophical schools that came to be of
importance for Italy; viz. the two dogmatic schools of Epicurus
(484) and Zeno (491) and the sceptical school of Arcesilaus (513)
and Carneades (541-625), or, to use the sch