e usual level
of their kind, and in the course of this long intimacy must have had
full opportunity of learning from each other. From Scipio Panaetius
would learn the secrets of the Roman temperament, and divine the right
methods of dealing with it, and the result of this was a happy
modification of the old rigidity of the Stoic principles--an adaptation
of them to the Roman character which had far-reaching consequences. From
Panaetius Scipio and his friends would learn a new and illuminating
conception of man's place in the universe, and of his relation to the
Power manifested in it. To understand the power of Stoicism on the mind
of these Romans and their intellectual successors, it is necessary to
have a clear idea of this illumination.

Hitherto there had been nothing in the religion of Rome, or of any other
city-state, to make it inevitable, reasonable, that man should worship
the Power, except tradition and self-interest, involved in the tradition
and self-interest of the family and the city. The gods belonged, as we
saw, to family or city as divine inhabitants, and if you neglected them
they would show their anger against you. Originally it was _religio_,
the feeling of awe for something distinct from man and unknown to him,
which forced him to propitiate that which he might fear, but had no
reason, except the instinct of self-preservation, to reverence; and
later on, as he came to know his _numina_ better, to make them, so to
speak, his own, and to formulate the methods of propitiating them, he
gradually came also to take them for granted, and to worship them as a
matter of traditional duty. The idea of conforming his life to the will
of any of these _numina_ would, of course, be absolutely strange to
him--the expression would have no meaning whatever for him. The help
which he sought from them was not moral help, but material.[776] But
now, when the _religio_ has been hypnotised and soothed away, and when
the tradition of ceremonial observance was growing dim and weak, when he
is left alone with his fellow-men, and without any binding reason for
right conduct towards them, he may learn from Stoicism that there is a
Power above and beyond all his _numina_, yet involving and embracing
them all, to which, and by the help of which, as a man endowed with
reason, he _must_ conform his life.

The theology held and taught by Panaetius, in common with all Stoics at
all periods, was based upon two leading thoughts, in t