THE HISTORY OF OLD ROME

IV. The Revolution

From: The History of Rome, by Theodor Mommsen
Translated with the sanction of the author by William Purdie Dickson

Chapter XII - Nationality, Religion, and Education

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Page 22

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. But infinitely more important was the new state-philosophy and state-religion, which emanated from the blending of the Stoic philosophy and the Roman religion.

The speculative element, from the first impressed with but little energy on the system of Zeno, and still further weakened when that system found admission to Rome--after the Greek schoolmasters had already for a century been busied in driving this philosophy into boys' heads and thereby driving the spirit out of it--fell completely into the shade in Rome, where nobody speculated but the money-changers; little more was said as to the ideal development of the God ruling in the soul of man, or of the divine world-law.

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