e wholly without
religious elements as to discover any new state-religion fitted
to take the place of the old. So the besom of revolution swept doubtless
at times very roughly through the cobwebs of the augural bird-lore;(1)
nevertheless the rotten machine creaking at every joint
survived the earthquake which swallowed up the republic itself,
and preserved its insipidity and its arrogance without diminution
for transference to the new monarchy. As a matter of course,
it fell more and more into disfavour with all those who preserved
their freedom of judgment. Towards the state-religion indeed
public opinion maintained an attitude essentially indifferent;
it was on all sides recognized as an institution of political convenience,
and no one specially troubled himself about it with the exception
of political and antiquarian literati. But towards its philosophical
sister there gradually sprang up among the unprejudiced public
that hostility, which the empty and yet perfidious hypocrisy of set phrases
never fails in the long run to awaken. That a presentiment of its own
worthlessness began to dawn on the Stoa itself, is shown by its attempt
artificially to infuse into itself some fresh spirit in the way
of syncretism. Antiochus of Ascalon (flourishing about 675), who professed
to have patched together the Stoic and Platonic-Aristotelian systems
into one organic unity, in reality so far succeeded that his misshapen
doctrine became the fashionable philosophy of the conservatives
of his time and was conscientiously studied by the genteel dilettanti
and literati of Rome. Every one who displayed any intellectual vigour,
opposed the Stoa or ignored it. It was principally antipathy
towards the boastful and tiresome Roman Pharisees, coupled doubtless
with the increasing disposition to take refuge from practical life
in indolent apathy or empty irony, that occasioned during this epoch
the extension of the system of Epicurus to a larger circle
and the naturalization of the Cynic philosophy of Diogenes in Rome.
However stale and poor in thought the former might be, a philosophy,
which did not seek the way to wisdom through an alteration
of traditional terms but contented itself with those in existence,
and throughout recognized only the perceptions of sense as true,
was always better than the terminological jingle and the hollow
conceptions of the Stoic wisdom; and the Cynic philosophy
was of all the philosophical systems of the