them out. The later schools did not add much to the body of
philosophy. What they did was to emphasize different sides of the
doctrine of their predecessors and to drive views to their logical
consequences. The great lesson of Greek philosophy is that it is
worth while to do right irrespective of reward and punishment and
regardless of the shortness of life. This lesson the Stoics so
enforced by the earnestness of their lives and the influence of their
moral teaching that it has become associated more particularly with
them. Cicero, though he always classed himself as an Academic,
exclaims in one place that he is afraid the Stoics are the only
philosophers, and whenever he is combating Epicureanism his language
is that of a Stoic. Some of Vergil's most eloquent passages seem to
be inspired by Stoic speculation. Even Horace, despite his banter
about the sage, in his serious moods borrows the language of the
Stoics. It was they who inspired the highest flights of declamatory
eloquence in Persius and Juvenal. Their moral philosophy affected the
world through Roman law, the great masters of which were brought up
under its influence. So all pervasive indeed was this moral
philosophy of the Stoics that it was read by the Jews of Alexandria
into Moses under the veil of allegory and was declared to be the
inner meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures. If the Stoics then did not
add much to the body of Philosophy, they did a great work in
popularising it and bringing it to bear upon life.

An intense practicality was a mark of the later Greek philosophy.
This was common to Stoicism with its rival Epicureanism. Both
regarded philosophy as 'the art of life,' though they differed in
their conception of what that art should be. Widely as the two
schools were opposed to one another, they had also other features in
common. Both were children of an age in which the free city had given