Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

xcii INTRODUCTION SECT.
Persius in his Satires, Lucan in his Pharsalia, remind
us how much Stoicism did to fan the flickering after-
glow of Latin poetry
into life. Satire and social
epigram each bear testimony to its growing power and
recognition as a factor in social development.
Prose tells a somewhat different tale. There, at
least in what may be called the political departments
History, Oratory, Memoirs, Epistolary correspondence,
and Law the Latin mind displayed unsurpassed con-
structive power. These only reflect indirectly, or in-
clude as an incident of their main theme, the currents
of philosophic thought. But here, too, it may
be said
that such moral inspirations as appear spring mainly, if
not entirely, from Stoic impulses ; while in philosophic
treatises Stoicism holds the field almost alone. Cicero
is indeed encyclopaedic in his range of interest ; but it
is hardly too much to say that he failed to commend
to his own countrymen, or even to assimilate for his
own purposes, anything that lay outside of Stoicism.
His permanent contributions to moral philosophy were
the De Officiis and the Tusculan Disputations. The
metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle, and the Sceptical
dialectic of the later Academy, were meaningless and
unintelligible to the Roman. For him, Ethics were the
sole content of philosophy; and the only system that
came into active competition with Stoicism was that
of Epicurus.
Its earliest propaganda in Rome was vigorous and
well sustained; and Lucretius embraced it with an
iconoclastic fervour that is without parallel in the
history of the School. But he found no following :