of the Cynics, than were those of earlier Stoics. Probably the admiration of Plato felt by cultivated
Romans influenced him in abandoning the dogmatic narrowness of his Stoic predecessors. In the
broader form given to it by him and by his successor Posidonius, Stoicism strongly appealed to the
more serious among the Romans.
At a later date, Epictetus, though a Greek, lived most of his life in Rome. Rome supplied him with
most of his illustrations; he is always exhorting the wise man not to tremble in the presence of the
Emperor. We know the influence of Epictetus on Marcus Aurelius, but his influence on the
Greeks is hard to trace.
Plutarch (ca. A.D. 46-120), in his Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, traced a parallelism
between the most eminent men of the two countries. He spent a considerable time in Rome, and
was honoured by the Emperors Hadrian and Trajan. In addition to his Lives, he wrote numerous
works on philosophy, religion, natural history, and morals. His Lives are obviously concerned to
reconcile Greece and Rome in man's thoughts.
On the whole, apart from such exceptional men, Rome acted as a blight on the Greek-speaking
part of the Empire. Thought and art alike declined. Until the end of the second century A.D., life,
for the well-to-do, was pleasant and easy-going; there was no incentive to strenuousness, and little
opportunity for great achievement. The recognized schools of philosophy--the Academy, the
Peripatetics, the Epicureans, and the Stoics--continued to exist until they were closed by Justinian,
from Christian bigotry, in the year A.D. 529. None of these, however, showed any vitality
throughout the time after Marcus Aurelius, except the Neoplatonists in the third century A.D.,
whom we shall consider in the next chapter; and these men were hardly at all influenced by Rome.
The Latin and Greek halves of the Empire became more and more divergent; the knowledge of
Greek became rare in the west, and after Constantine Latin, in the east, survived only in law and in
the army.
II. The influence of Greece and the East in Rome. There are here two very different things to
consider: first, the influence of Hellenic art and literature and philosophy on the most cultivated
Romans; second, the spread of non-Hellenic religions and superstitions throughout the Western
world.
(1) When the Romans first came in contact with Greeks, they