Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

iv STOICISM IN HISTORY xciii
though the name and fashion of Epicureanism continued
to prevail, it did not produce one spokesman or teacher
of conviction and ability, and fast degenerated into the
superficial and popular apologetics of self-indulgence;
as such it found adherents among the dilettanti of the
capital, but it touched no responsive chord in the
national ethos of Rome, and was incapable of that
accommodation to traditional beliefs which commended
Stoicism to men of patriotic, conservative, and religious
temperament. Thus, though
the School survived at
Athens, and M. Aurelius himself included it among his
professorial endowments, as an effective creed and theory
of morals it was dead.
Stoicism was, in fact, the one philosophy congenial
to the Roman type. The emphasis it laid on morals,
the firmness and austerity of its code, the harshness of
its judgment on defaulters, the stern repudiation of
emotional considerations or impulses, even the narrowness
and inflexibility of its moral logic, all commended
it to Roman sympathies. The strength of Rome, the
secret of her empire, lay in character^ in an operative
code of honour, domestic, civic and (more at least than
in other states) international. And the Stoic concep-
tion of virtue corresponded closely to the range of qualities
denoted by Roman virtus manliness. The traditional
.type of Roman patriot, the patrician stedfastness of a
Camillus or Dentatus, the devotion of a Decius, the
dogged self-sacrifice of a Regulus, the sternness of a
Brutus ordering his disobedient son to execution, the
immovable and often ruthless allegiance to the con-
stituted order of the commonwealth, were treasured
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