No one of these three systems became in any proper sense popular. The plain intelligible character of Euhemerism exerted doubtless a certain power of attraction over the Romans, and in particular produced only too deep an effect on the conventional history of Rome with its at once childish and senile conversion of fable into history; but it remained without material influence on the Roman religion, because the latter from the first dealt only in allegory and not in fable, and it was not possible in Rome as in Hellas to write biographies of Zeus the first, second, and third. The modern sophistry could only succeed where, as in Athens, clever volubility was indigenous, and where, moreover, the long series of philosophical systems that had come and gone had accumulated huge piles of intellectual rubbish. Against the Epicurean quietism, in fine, everything revolted that was sound and honest in the Roman character so thoroughly addressing itself to action. Yet it found more partisans than Euhemerism and the sophistic school, and this was probably the reason why the police continued to wage war against it longest and most seriously. But this Roman Epicureanism was not so much a philosophic system as a sort of philosophic mask, under which--very much against the design of its strictly moral founder-- thoughtless sensual enjoyment disguised itself for good society; one of the earliest adherents of this sect, for instance, Titus Albucius, figures in the poems of Lucilius as the prototype of a Roman Hellenizing to bad purpose.
Roman Stoa
Far different were the position and influence of the Stoic philosophy in Italy. In direct contrast to these schools it attached itself to the religion of the land as closely as science can at all accommodate itself to faith. To the popular faith with its gods and oracles the Stoic adhered on principle, in so far as he recognized in it an instinctive knowledge, to which scientific knowledge was bound to have regard and even in doubtful cases to subordinate itself. He believed in a different way from the people rather than in different objects; the essentially true and supreme God was in his view doubtless the world-soul, but every manifestation of the primitive God was in its turn divine, the stars above all, but also the earth, the vine, the soul of the illustrious mortal whom the people honoured as a hero, and in fact every departed spirit of a former man. This philosophy was really better adapted for Rome than for the land where it first arose. The objection of the pious believer, that the god of the Stoic had neither sex nor age nor corporeality and was converted from a person into a conception, had a meaning in Greece, but not in Rome. The coarse allegorizing and moral purification, which were characteristic of the Stoical doctrine of the gods, destroyed the very marrow of the Hellenic mythology; but the plastic power of the Romans, scanty even in their epoch of simplicity, had produced no more than a light veil enveloping the original intuition or the original conception, out of which the divinity had arisen--a veil that might be stripped off without special damage. Pallas Athene might be indignant, when she found herself suddenly transmuted into the conception of memory: Minerva had hitherto been in reality not much more. The supernatural Stoic, and the allegoric Roman, theology coincided on the whole in their result. But, even if the philosopher was obliged to designate individual propositions of the priestly lore as doubtful or as erroneous--as when the Stoics, for example, rejecting the doctrine of apotheosis, saw in Hercules, Castor, and Pollux nothing but the spirits of distinguished men, or as when they could not allow the images of the gods to be regarded as representations of divinity--it was at least not the habit of the adherents of Zeno to make war on these erroneous doctrines and to overthrow the false gods; on the contrary, they everywhere evinced respect and reverence for the religion of the land even in its weaknesses. The inclination also of the Stoa towards a casuistic morality and towards a systematic treatment of the professional sciences was quite to the mind of the Romans, especially of the Romans of this period, who no longer like their fathers practised in unsophisticated fashion self-government and good morals, but resolved the simple morality of their ancestors into a catechism of allowable and non-allowable actions; whose grammar and jurisprudence, moreover, urgently demanded a methodical treatment, without possessing the ability to develop such a treatment of themselves.
Wide Influence Of Stoicism Panaetius
So this philosophy thoroughly incorporated itself, as a plant borrowed no doubt from abroad but acclimatized on Italian soil, with the Roman national economy, and we meet its traces in the most diversified spheres of action. Its earliest appearance beyond doubt goes further back; but the Stoa was first raised to full influence in the higher ranks of Roman society by means of the group which gathered round Scipio Aemilianus. Panaetius of Rhodes, the instructor of Scipio and of all Scipio's intimate friends in the Stoic philosophy, who was constantly in his train and usually attended him even on journeys, knew how to adapt the system to clever men of the world, to keep its speculative side in the background, and to modify in some measure the dryness of the terminology and the insipidity of its moral catechism, more particularly by calling in the aid of the earlier philosophers, among whom Scipio himself had an especial predilection for the Socrates of Xenophon. Thenceforth the most noted statesmen and scholars professed the Stoic philosophy--among others Stilo and Quintus Scaevola, the founders of scientific philology and of scientific jurisprudence. The scholastic formality of system, which thenceforth prevails at least externally in these professional sciences and is especially associated with a fanciful, charade-like, insipid method of etymologizing, descends from the Stoa.