Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

i ORIGINS OF STOICISM xv
have been no Porch.' And this power of development
and adaptation was inherent in the system. Founded
in the fourth century B.C., it was a quick and growing creed
in the second century A.D. ; living, it survived transplanta-
tion from the Greek world to the Roman, from the school
and the cloister to the Senate and the throne ; dying, it
bequeathed no small part of its disciplines, its dogmas,
and its phraseology to the Christianity by which it was
ingathered. 1 In these respects its history resembles
that of a religion rather than a speculative system ;
while
its range, from Socrates to M. Antoninus, covers almost
all that was permanent in the ancient culture, and even
survived the wreck of European Paganism.
From the first its hold upon the past was deep
and conscious : its evolution is a striking instance how
human thought, convinced by slow experience, secures
gradual advance, by combining seeming opposites into
a solid platform for new effort. Supervening at the
moment when the original forces of Greek thought fell
back exhausted, Stoicism constructed an impressive
and, to some extent, a permanent unity out of factors
derived from opposite types and schools of thought,
and so evolved moral and social conceptions that have
become an heirloom of Western civilisation, and are
embedded in the inmost structure of the Christian state.
In this sense it is the most *
historical '
of ancient philo-
sophies in cast and in expression ; and M. Aurelius is
only partially intelligible without some knowledge of
1 ' The basis of Christian society is not Christian, but Roman
and Stoical '
'
Hibbert Lectures on The Influence of Greek
(Hatch,
Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church,' p. 170).