Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

DECLINE OF ATHENIAN LIFE. 7
brilliant, though the most inconstant and profligate
Graeco-Asiatic rulers, that afford graphic
degradation to which Athens had sunk in the days
of the
illustrations of the
in which
the Epicureans and the Stoics arose. We have even pre
served to us a hymn
of divine honour addressed to this
prince
by the Athenians. 1 By this time the public life of Athens,
which had been her glory, had utterly perished. Men were
cut rudely adrift from that which had been their guide and
law, the public opinion of their State. There was no State ;
the brutal hand of war had abolished all political inde
pendence throughout the whole world of which Greece was
the centre ;
there was no fixity in any political arrange
ments ;
one day Athens belonged to Demetrius, the next to
Cassander, just as the fortune of war decreed, while the
citizens, who once wielded a wide and splendid empire, were
the sport of the caprices and the insults of their despots.
The wealth too of the city was dissipated by the constant
inconstancy of the political combinations in which it was
included. Its trade decayed, its genial youth was drawn off,
not for patriotic expeditions but to man the mercenary armies
which for many generations
filled the Graeco- Oriental world
with confusion and slaughter.
In such a condition of society, amid the clash of arms and
the struggles of contending despots, the noble quest
of the
elder Philosophy for the True, the Beautiful, the Good, passed
utterly away. Within a generation of their deaths, the works
of Plato and Aristotle had almost ceased to occupy the atten
tion of their countrymen, and new Schools, new Sects as they
were well called, with new questions and new dogmas, were
in possession of the field. The man of whom and with whom
Socrates discoursed was emphatically a citizen, a man in
whose thoughts devotion to the State was uppermost. These
were days when Athenians were too busy
1
Athenseus, vi. 63.
with the duties and