. In the scepticism that accompanied the first
introduction of philosophy into Rome, in the dissolution of the old
fables about Tartarus and the Styx, and the dissemination of
Epicureanism among the people, this doctrine, notwithstanding the
beautiful reasonings of Cicero and the religious faith of a few who
clung like Plutarch to the mysteries in which it was perpetuated, had
sunk very low. An interlocutor in Cicero expressed what was probably a
common feeling, when he acknowledged that, with the writings of Plato
before him, he could believe and realise it; but when he closed the
book, the reasonings seemed to lose their power, and the world of
spirits grew pale and unreal. If Ennius could elicit the plaudits of a
theatre when he proclaimed that the gods took no part in human affairs,
Caesar could assert in the senate, without scandal and almost without
dissent, that death was the end of all things. Pliny, perhaps the
greatest of all the Roman scholars, adopting the sentiment of all the
school of Epicurus, describes the belief in a future life as a form of
madness, a puerile and a pernicious illusion. The opinions of the Stoics
were wavering and uncertain. Their first doctrine was that the soul of
man has a future and independent, but not an eternal existence, that it
survives until the conflagration that was to destroy the world when all
finite things would be absorbed in the all-pervading soul of nature.
Chrysippus, however, restricted to the best and noblest souls this
future existence, which Cleanthes had awarded to all, and among the
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
unce