have now reached the end of the period of the Republic; but before I
go on to the age of Augustus, with which I must bring these lectures to
an end, I must ask attention to a movement which can best be described
by the somewhat vague term Mysticism, but is generally known to
historians of philosophy as Neo-pythagoreanism. The fact is that such
tendency as there ever was at Rome towards Mysticism--which was never
indeed a strong one till Rome had almost ceased to be Roman[804]--seems
to have taken the form of thinking known as Pythagorean. The ideas at
the root of the Pythagorean doctrine, the belief in a future life, the
conception of this life as only preparatory to another, the conviction
of the need of purgation in another life and of the preparatory
discipline and asceticism to be practised while we are here,--these are
truly religious ideas; and even among Romans the religious instinct,
though it might be hypnotised, could never be entirely destroyed. When
it awoke from time to time in the minds of thinking men it was apt to
express itself in Pythagorean tones. With the ignorant and vulgar it
might find a baser expression in superstition pure and simple,--in the
finding of portents, in astrology, in Dionysiac orgies; but with these
Pythagoreanism must not be reckoned. These, as they appeared on the soil
of Italy, were the bastard children of quasi-religious thought. But the
movement of which I speak marks a reaction, among men who could both
feel and think, against the whole tendency of Roman religious experience
as we have been tracing it; against the extreme formalism, now
meaningless, of the Roman State religion; against the extreme scepticism
and indifference so obvious in the last century and a half of the
republican era; against the purely intellectual appeal of the ethical
systems of which I have been recently speaking. Stoicism indeed, as we
shall see, held out a hand to the new movement, simply because Stoicism
had a religious side which was wanting in Epicurism. But the thought
that our senses and our reason are not after all the sole fountains of
our knowledge, a thought which is the essence of mysticism, was really
foreign to Stoicism; and when this thought did find a soil in the mind
of a thinking Roman of this age, it was likely to spring up in a
transcendental form which we may call Pythagoreanism.

South Italy was indeed the true home of the Pythagorean teaching. There
its founder had established it,