Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

52 MARC QS AURELIUS.
of his bitter satires, pictures him at table, obliged, like the
chaplain, to put up
with the crumbs of the feast. If at
any time a pig be cut up, or a venison pasty, you had
need have the carver your friend, or you will divide with
Prometheus, and nothing but the bones will come to your
share. But probably the chaplain and the philosopher got on
the whole as much respect as they
deserved. In Borne there
was no lack of adventurers who donned the philosopher s
cloak, and learnt the mere jargon of the schools, to make a
living by attaching
themselves to the household of some
rich patron and on such no ; sympathy need be wasted.
Dion Cassius makes Augustus warn Maecenas against such
in the significant words, Under the cloak of that profession
many knaves bring infinite misfortune on the State as well
as on their dupes. Lucian speaks out more roundly. He
charges the professional moralists with being greedy of
lucre, more passionate than dogs, more cowardly than hares,
more lascivious than asses, more thievish than cats, more
quarrelsome
than cocks. But there were instances of a
very different kind, as, for example, when the younger Cato
travelled to Pergamos to persuade
the Stoic Athenodorus
to enter his household, and entertained him till his death.
More important however than the treatment of these
teachers is the place they occupied in the social system, and
the function they were expected to fufil.
They came to be
in Borne a kind of clerical order ;
limited in number, and
moving entirely among the upper ten thousand ;
but ex
pected to say a phrase in season on the important domestic
occasions, and above all to have words of consolation for the
dying. There is an amusing tale of one Favorinus who was
discoursing to his class, when he heard that the wife of
one of his former pupils, a man of wealth and station, had
been delivered of a son. He proposed that they should go
to congratulate her. So off they
went. Introduced to the