f philosophic mask, under
which--very much against the design of its strictly moral founder--
thoughtless sensual enjoyment disguised itself for good society;
one of the earliest adherents of this sect, for instance, Titus
Albucius, figures in the poems of Lucilius as the prototype of
a Roman Hellenizing to bad purpose.

Roman Stoa

Far different were the position and influence of the Stoic
philosophy in Italy. In direct contrast to these schools it
attached itself to the religion of the land as closely as science
can at all accommodate itself to faith. To the popular faith with
its gods and oracles the Stoic adhered on principle, in so far as
he recognized in it an instinctive knowledge, to which scientific
knowledge was bound to have regard and even in doubtful cases
to subordinate itself. He believed in a different way from
the people rather than in different objects; the essentially true
and supreme God was in his view doubtless the world-soul, but every
manifestation of the primitive God was in its turn divine, the
stars above all, but also the earth, the vine, the soul of the
illustrious mortal whom the people honoured as a hero, and in fact
every departed spirit of a former man. This philosophy was really
better adapted for Rome than for the land where it first arose.
The objection of the pious believer, that the god of the Stoic had
neither sex nor age nor corporeality and was converted from a
person into a conception, had a meaning in Greece, but not in
Rome. The coarse allegorizing and moral purification, which were
characteristic of the Stoical doctrine of the gods, destroyed the
very marrow of the Hellenic mythology; but the plastic power of the
Romans, scanty even in their epoch of simplicity, had produced no
more than a light veil enveloping the original intuition or the
original conception, out of which the divinity had arisen--a veil
that might be stripped off without special damage. Pallas Athene
might be indignant, when she found herself suddenly transmuted into
the conception of memory: Minerva had hitherto been in reality not
much more. The supernatural Stoic, and the allegoric Roman,
theology coincided on the whole in their result. But, even if
the philosopher was obliged to designate individual propositions
of the priestly lore as doubtful or as erroneous--as when the Stoics,
for example, rejecting the doctrine of apotheosis, saw in Hercules,
Castor, and Pollux nothing but the spirits o