is the only orator,
critic, poet, physician, nay, cobbler if you please; that the wise man
knows all that is to be known, and can do everything that is worth
doing, and so on. The school was often too academic, too abstract, too
fond of hearing itself talk. This, alas! is what most schools are, and
most schoolmasters.

Yet the Stoics were not altogether alien to the ordinary interests and
duties of life. They admitted a duty of co-operating in politics, at
least in such states as showed some desire for, or approach to, virtue.
They approved of the wise man taking part in education, of his marrying
and bringing up children, both for his own sake and his country's. He
will be ready even to 'withdraw himself from life on behalf of his
country or his friends. This 'withdrawal,' which was their word for
suicide, came unhappily to be much in the mouths of later, and
especially of the Roman, Stoics, who, in the sadness and restraint of
prevailing despotism, came to thank God that no one was compelled to
remain in life; he might 'withdraw' when the burden of life, the
hopelessness of useful activity, became too great.

With this sad, stern, yet not undignified note, the philosophy of
Greece speaks its last word. The later scepticism of the New Academy,
directed mainly to a negative criticism of the crude enough logic of
the {242} Stoics, or of the extravagances of their ethical doctrine,
contributed no substantial element to thought or morals. As an
eclectic system it had much vogue, side by side with Stoicism and
Epicureanism, among the Romans, having as its chief exponent Cicero, as
Epicureanism had Lucretius, and Stoicism, Seneca.

The common characteristic of all these systems in their later
developments, is their _cosmopolitanism_. _Homo sum, nil humani a me
alienum puto_, 'I am a man; nothing appertaining to humanity do I deem
alien from myself,' this was the true keynote of whatever was vital in
any of them. And the reason of this is not far to seek. We have seen
already (p. 82) how the chaos of sophistic doctrine was largely
conditioned, if not produced, by the breakdown of the old civic life of
Greece. The process hardly suffered delay from all the efforts of
Socrates and Plato. Cosmopolitanism was already a point of union
between the Cynics and Cyrenaics (see p. 128). And the march of
politics was always tending in the same direction. First through great
leagues, such as the Spartan or Athenian or Th