des at Rome

It was accordingly only a natural result, that the first contact of
Hellenic philosophy with the Roman nation equally firm in faith and
adverse to speculation should be of a thoroughly hostile character.
The Roman religion was entirely right in disdaining alike the
assaults and the reasoned support of these philosophical systems,
both of which did away with its proper character. The Roman state,
which instinctively felt itself assailed when religion was
attacked, reasonably assumed towards the philosophers the attitude
which a fortress assumes towards the spies of the army advancing
to besiege it, and as early as 593 dismissed the Greek philosophers
along with the rhetoricians from Rome. In fact the very first
debut of philosophy on a great scale in Rome was a formal
declaration of war against faith and morals. It was occasioned
by the occupation of Oropus by the Athenians, a step which they
commissioned three of the most esteemed professors of philosophy,
including Carneades the master of the modern sophistical school,
to justify before the senate (599). The selection was so far
appropriate, as the utterly scandalous transaction defied any
justification in common sense; whereas it was quite in keeping with
the circumstances of the case, when Carneades proved by thesis and
counter-thesis that exactly as many and as cogent reasons might be
adduced in praise of injustice as in praise of justice, and when
he showed in the best logical form that with equal propriety the
Athenians might be required to surrender Oropus and the Romans
to confine themselves once more to their old straw huts on the
Palatine. The young men who were masters of the Greek language
were attracted in crowds by the scandal as well as by the rapid and
emphatic delivery of the celebrated man; but on this occasion at
least Cato could not be found fault with, when he not only bluntly
enough compared the dialectic arguments of the philosophers to
the tedious dirges of the wailing-women, but also insisted on the
senate dismissing a man who understood the art of making right
wrong and wrong right, and whose defence was in fact nothing but
a shameless and almost insulting confession of wrong. But such
dismissals had no great effect, more especially as the Roman youth
could not be prevented from hearing philosophic discourses at
Rhodes and Athens. Men became accustomed first to tolerate
philosophy at least as a necessary evil, and ere long