Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

iv STOICISM IN HISTORY Ixxxix
famous Pontifex, were among the first to give welcome
to Panaetius ; Cato and Cicero, each in their own way,
are witnesses to its continued power; among Augustan
lawyers it could claim S. Sulpicius Rufus, Sextus
Pompeius, and others as disciples ; throughout the
darkest days of Imperial oppression it upheld the forms
of liberty ; carrying accepted weight in family and state,
and slowly mitigating the rigours and inequalities of the
old regime with the humaner influences that are the
glory of the Flavian and Antonine successions, it finally,
in the persons of the Antonines, father and son, took its
seat upon the throne.
In the field of letters the position of Stoicism was
more assured and definite. At the middle of the
second century, when wealth, supply of slaves, and
empire had wrought an increase of luxury and leisure,
which made intellectual as well as other forms of re-
creation a necessity, Rome stood at the turning of the
ways. She must either create a literature at home, or
import
it from abroad. Literature first finds form in
poetry, and the rough Saturnian, or uncouth pro-
vincialism of the Atellane farce, had no chance against
hexameter and iambic, and the finished perfection of
Greek drama. It was vain for Censor or Senate to
expel philosophers and lay a ban upon
rhetoricians and
professors ; the last and stoutest champion of the Latin
school, Cato himself, in his old age accepted Greek
supremacy, and Rome imported literature as a part of
her plunder of the world. Terence vindicates his claim
to originality by the boast that his plays are drawn
direct and solely from the Greek.