we call the art of verifying dates was known to them at an early
time; but there was no spontaneous rise of physical science to
suggest by its analogies of law and order a new method of research,
nor any natural springing up of the questioning spirit of
philosophy with its unification of all phenomena and all knowledge.
At the very time when the whole tide of Eastern superstition was
sweeping into the heart of the Capital the Senate banished the
Greek philosophers from Rome. And of the three systems which did
at length take some root in the city, those of Zeno and Epicurus
were used merely as the rule for the ordering of life, while the
dogmatic scepticism of Carneades, by its very principles,
annihilated the possibility of argument and encouraged a perfect
indifference to research.

Nor were the Romans ever fortunate enough like the Greeks to have
to face the incubus of any dogmatic system of legends and myths,
the immoralities and absurdities of which might excite a
revolutionary outbreak of sceptical criticism. For the Roman
religion became as it were crystallised and isolated from progress
at an early period of its evolution. Their gods remained mere
abstractions of commonplace virtues or uninteresting
personifications of the useful things of life. The old primitive
creed was indeed always upheld as a state institution on account of
the enormous facilities it offered for cheating in politics, but as
a spiritual system of belief it was unanimously rejected at a very
early period both by the common people and the educated classes,
for the sensible reason that it was so extremely dull. The former
took refuge in the mystic sensualities of the worship of Isis, the
latter in the Stoical rules of life. The Romans classified their
gods carefully in their order of precedence, analysed their