and there, mixed up with more popular
Orphic doctrine and practice, it must have remained latent for
centuries.[805] "Tenuit magnam illam Graeciam," says Cicero of
Pythagoras, "cum honore disciplinae, tum etiam auctoritate; multaque
saecula post sic viguit Pythagoreorum nomen, ut nulli alii docti
viderentur."[806] To South Italy Plato is said to have travelled to
study this philosophy, and to learn the doctrine of the immortality of
the soul; and the story is generally accepted as true.[807] But of any
missionary attempt of Pythagoreanism on Rome we know nothing--and
probably there was nothing to tell--till that mysterious plot to
introduce it after the Hannibalic war which I mentioned in a recent
lecture.[808] That war brought Rome into close contact with Tarentum and
southern Italy, and it is likely enough that the attempt to connect King
Numa with the philosopher, both in the familiar legend and in the
alleged discovery of the stone coffin with its forged manuscripts, had
its origin in this contact. The Senate could not object to the legend,
but it promptly stamped out this grotesque attempt at propagandism. Then
we hear no more of the doctrine for a century at least; but in the last
century B.C. we know that there appeared a number of Pythagorean
writings, falsely attributed to the founder himself or his
disciples,[809]--a method of propagandism which, like that of the
previous century, may perhaps be taken as marking the religious nature
of the doctrine, which needed the _ipse dixit_ of the founder or
something as near it as possible.[810] But of the immediate influence of
these writings we know nothing. The person really responsible for the
tendency to this kind of mysticism was undoubtedly the great Posidonius,
philosopher, historian, traveller, who more than any other man dominated
the Roman world of thought in the first half of the last century B.C.,
and whose writings, now surviving in a few fragments only, lie at the
back of nearly all the serious Roman literature of his own and indeed of
the following age.[811] Panaetius, there can be little doubt, had done
something to leaven Stoicism with Platonic-Aristotelian psychology,[812]
the general tendency of which was towards a dualism of Soul and Body.
The Stoics, in the strict sense of the name, "could not be content with
any philosophy which divided heaven from earth, the spiritual from the
material." "They rebelled against the idea of a transcendent God and a