182 LATIN LANGUAGE 



not without contact with Oriental thought. How deep the world's 

 debt to the East is will probably never be fully known. 



Stoicism appealed strongly to the Roman character to its 

 dignity, its piety, its commercial integrity, its 8euri8a.ip.ovia.. 1 I am 

 speaking, of course, of the Roman character at its best. It is 

 worth remark that Ifie only department of Latin literature, except 

 the literature of Law, which was distinctly a Roman creation was a 

 special kind of didactic literature, precisely the sphere in which these 

 Stoical qualities had a field for their exercise, though it goes by the 

 name of Satire. If we had adhered to the name chosen by Lucilius 

 and Horace, it might, perhaps, have suggested to us as an English 

 equivalent the word "Sermons." What are the Sermones of Horace 

 but lay sermons, not without a spice of humor? And though he is 

 fond of drawing caricatures of the Stoics, caricatures which we are 

 too ready to take au grand serieux, he was himself a bit of a Stoic at 

 heart, at any rate when in a moral mood. So were most of the great 

 Roman writers. Virgil seems to have given up his early Epicurean- 

 ism in favor of a religious view of things in which Stoicism and 

 Platonism were blended, if not indeed one: the doctrine of the 

 world-soul as expressed in the fourth Georgic (219-227) is, I think, 

 Stoic rather than Platonic; the famous passage in the sixth ^Eneid 

 (724 751), with its doctrine of rewards and punishments in the future 

 state, is perhaps Platonic rather than Stoic; for the Stoics believed 

 in absorption in the 7rj/ev//,a rov Koo-p,ov (spiritus, or anima, mundi), 

 rather than any form of personal immortality. 2 The coryphaei of the 

 Scipionic circle were, as I have said, all Stoics Lucilius, 3 Lselius 

 Furius Philus, Scsevola, and the rest; so too, perhaps, even Cato the 

 Censor, in his old age. Terence talks Stoicism in the line: 



Homo sum: human! nil a me alienum puto (Heaut. 77). 



Varro was half a Stoic; Cicero a good deal more than half. Even 

 Sallust preaches Stoicism when he wishes to be impressive. Under 

 the Empire we find Stoicism professed in Seneca and in Persius, as 

 well as in the Emperor Marcus Aurelius and the Phrygian slave 

 Epictetus. It commanded the respect of Lucan and Juvenal, whose 

 later Satires are practically Stoic tracts, 4 and it would have made a 



1 Polybius, vi, 56, 10. 



2 The virtues that Virgil admired most were fortitude (patientia) and piety. 

 See the passage in Donatus's Life, ch. 18, quoted by Sellar, p. 123, and by Wick- 

 ham, Introduction to Horace, Ode i, 24 (p. 73). 



3 In my opinion Lucilius was a Stoic; cf. especially the fragment about virtus 

 (= wisdom), preserved by Lactantius. The word virtus acquired a technical 

 philosophical sense in 'Latin, equivalent to the Stoic opBbs \6yos ; cf . Cic. Tusc. 

 iv, 15, 34 (=recta ratio), De Leg. i, 8, 25, De Fin. in, 4, 12; Hor. Ode n, 2, 18, 

 in, 2, 17; Sat. n, 1, 70, 72; Ejrist. I, 1, 17. 



4 I have not forgotten the passage (13, 121) in which the Stoic is spoken of as 

 differing from the Cynic only in his tunic. The Stoics and the Cynics were really 

 akin. 



