rtainly, and even when they accepted it as a fact, they shrank from
proposing it as a motive. The whole system of stoical ethics, which
carried self-sacrifice to a point that has scarcely been equalled, and
exercised an influence which has rarely been surpassed, was evolved
without any assistance from the doctrine of a future life. Pagan
antiquity has bequeathed us few nobler treatises of morals than the "De
Officiis" of Cicero, which was avowedly an expansion of a work of
Panaetius. It has left us no grander example than that of Epictetus, the
sickly, deformed slave of a master who was notorious for his barbarity,
enfrancished late in life, but soon driven into exile by Domitian, who,
while sounding the very abyss of human misery, and looking forward to
death as to simple decomposition, was yet so filled with the sense of
the Divine presence, that his life was one continued hymn to Providence,
and his writings and his example, which appeared to his contemporaries
almost the ideal of human goodness, have not lost their consoling power
through all the ages and the vicissitudes they have survived.

There was, however, another form of immortality which exercised a much
greater influence among the Roman moralists. The desire for reputation,
and especially for posthumous reputation--that "last infirmity of noble
minds"--assumed an extraordinary prominence among the springs of Roman
heroism, and was also the origin of that theatrical and overstrained
phraseology which the greatest of ancient moralists rarely escaped. But
we should be altogether in error if we inferred, as some have done, that
paganism never rose to the conception of virtue concealing itself from
the world, and consenting voluntarily to degradation. No characters were
more highly appreciated in antiquity than those of men who, through a
sense of duty, opposed the strong current of popular favour; of men like
Fabius, who consented for the sake of their country to incur the
reputation that is most fatal to a soldier; of men like Cato, who
remained unmoved among the scoffs, the insults, and the ridicule of an
angry crowd. Cicero, expounding the principles of stoicism, declared
that no one has attained to true philosophy who has not learnt that all
vice should be avoided, "though it were concealed from the eyes of gods
and men," and that no deeds are more laudable than those which are done
without ostentation, and far from the sight of men. The writings of the
Stoi