Page:The age of Justinian and Theodora (Volume 2).djvu/73

 whence the name of Stoics became attached popularly to his philosophical coterie. As the founder of Stoicism was an immigrant from the near East his mind was overcast by the Oriental sense of resignation under oppression; and an ethical doctrine of doing and suffering in a world of adversity was the gift of the Porch to the humanity of the period. The circumstances of the times created and gradually increased the need for such a philosophy in the West. Grecian liberty passed under the despotic sway of Macedon, and later, under that of Rome, whilst the Latin Republic at length succumbed to the ambition of its military chiefs, and an arbitrary emperor usurped the place of a spirited democracy. Thus the tenets of all those ardent souls who shunned the servility of a court, and chafed under political restraints which they were powerless to throw off were derived from Zeno.

The foregoing schools were essentially of a theological cast, and inculcated more or less dogmatically an attitude of veneration and piety in respect of a divine providence, but the leading feature of a fourth, founded about the same time as that of the Stoics, was a frank repudiation of any form of religious ritual. Epicurus was an Athenian by blood, but his youth had been passed abroad; and he claimed to have originated, without the aid of a master, the rule of life which he taught to his disciples. At the age of thirty-five he settled in his ancestral city (306 ), within