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The history of Rome. Book IVTheir doctrine as to the gods and the state soon exhibited a singular family resemblance to the actual institutions of those who gave them bread; instead of illustrating the cosmopolitan state of the philosopher, they made their meditations turn on the wise arrangement of the Roman magistracies; and while the more refined Stoics such as Panaetius had left the question of divine revelation by wonders and signs open as a thing conceivable but uncertain, and had decidedly rejected astrology, his immediate successors contended for that doctrine of revelation or, in other words, for the Roman augural discipline as rigidly and firmly as for any other maxim of the school, and made extremely unphilosophical concessions even to astrology. The leading feature of the system came more and more to be its casuistic doctrine of duties. It suited itself to the hollow pride of virtue, in which the Romans of this period sought their compensation amidst the various humbling circumstances of their contact with the Greeks; and it put into formal shape a befitting dogmatism of morality, which, like every well-bred system of morals, combined with the most rigid precision as a whole the most complaisant indulgence in the details[9] ...» |
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