Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

Ixxxviii INTRODUCTION SECT.
eclectic and Platonic form, secured an early and abiding
hold upon the intellectual leaders of Rome. The De
Officiis of Cicero is a confessed adaptation from the
cognate treatise of Panaetius.
But apart from the personality of Panaetius, Stoicism
fell upon congenial soil; the time was ripe for its
acceptance. The historical parallel is full of interest
and meaning. Scipio, the friend and patron of Panaetius,
executed final doom on Carthage. As Stoicism sprang
historically out of the supersession of Greek city-states
and the expansion of Greece into the world-empire of
Alexander, so too its second birth in Italy heralds the
imperial stage in the destinies of the great Republic.
Upon the fall of Carthage, Africa and Macedonia were
a few years added Asia
constituted Provinces of Rome ;
to the number; Rome was no more a city, but an
Empire, and her mightiest task, the evolution of Imperial
law and administration, lay before her. In the accom-
plishment of this Stoicism was no unimportant factor.
It was the one philosophy, which in its conceptions of
social obligation, of world-citizenship, and of the solidarity
and brotherhood of man, contained the germs of a great
political order. True, the enactment of laws does not
come within the province of schools of philosophy, and
influence must filter through individuals, rather than
but it
proceed from accredited or formal organisations,
must not for that reason be belittled or ignored, and in
the case of Stoicism the proof rests on no mere inferential
evidence. Its voice was continually heard among the
official circles of Rome ; the earliest of great Roman
lawyers, M. Scaevola the Augur, and the yet more