Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

xciv INTRODUCTION SECT.
historical exemplifications of unformulated Stoicism. Its
of view was in its favour.
very narrowness and obstinacy
Cato (of Utica) was typically Roman, and by his faults
and limitations as much as his backbone of virtue
became for a time the ideal of Roman Stoicism.
' The
Republican opposition,' as Mommsen in his scornful
'
borrowed from Cato its whole attitude
manner puts it,
stately, transcendental in its rhetoric, pretentiously
rigid, hopeless, and faithful to death ; and accordingly,
it began even immediately after his death to revere as a
saint the man who in his lifetime was not unfrequently
its laughing-stock and scandal.' The strength and the
persistence of these historical attachments finds testimony
in the Thoughts of Marcus, 1 and they enriched Stoicism
with that vein of sentiment which in theory it plumed
itself upon repudiating. Roman Stoicism, as it were,
'believed in the communion of saints.'
Thus the more morality, political and personal,
became self-conscious, and the need of some reasoned
theory of conduct was pressed home by Greek influences
to men of character and culture, the more did everything
that was serious at Rome gravitate towards
rational and tempered
Stoicism as its creed. In the
long Reign of Terror, under which Rome cowered in
the first century, when virtue could only speak with
bated breath, and liberty and honour kept within
closed doors, Stoicism (like Christianity) was maturing
and effectualising its moral energies. It gains a breadth
and a reality unknown to it before, and takes shape as
' Roman Stoicism.' The Satires of Persius voice the
1 See infra, p. cxxv.