noted statesmen and
scholars professed the Stoic philosophy--among others Stilo and
Quintus Scaevola, the founders of scientific philology and of
scientific jurisprudence. The scholastic formality of system,
which thenceforth prevails at least externally in these
professional sciences and is especially associated with a fanciful,
charade-like, insipid method of etymologizing, descends from the
Stoa. But infinitely more important was the new state-philosophy
and state-religion, which emanated from the blending of the Stoic
philosophy and the Roman religion. The speculative element, from
the first impressed with but little energy on the system of Zeno,
and still further weakened when that system found admission to
Rome--after the Greek schoolmasters had already for a century been
busied in driving this philosophy into boys' heads and thereby
driving the spirit out of it--fell completely into the shade in
Rome, where nobody speculated but the money-changers; little more
was said as to the ideal development of the God ruling in the soul
of man, or of the divine world-law. The Stoic philosophers showed
themselves not insensible to the very lucrative distinction of
seeing their system raised into the semi-official Roman state-
philosophy, and proved altogether more pliant than from their
rigorous principles we should have expected. Their doctrine as to
the gods and the state soon exhibited a singular family resemblance
to the actual institutions of those who gave them bread; instead of
illustrating the cosmopolitan state of the philosopher, they made
their meditations turn on the wise arrangement of the Roman
magistracies; and while the more refined Stoics such as Panaetius
had left the question of divine revelation by wonders and signs
open as a thing conceivable but uncertain, and had decidedly
rejected astrology, his immediate successors contended for that
doctrine of revelation or, in other words, for the Roman augural
discipline as rigidly and firmly as for any other maxim of the
school, and made extremely unphilosophical concessions even to
astrology. The leading feature of the system came more and more
to be its casuistic doctrine of duties. It suited itself to the
hollow pride of virtue, in which the Romans of this period sought
their compensation amidst the various humbling circumstances of
their contact with the Greeks; and it put into formal shape a
befitting dogmatism of morality, which, like every well-br