The whole system of stoical ethics, which
carried self-sacrifice to a point that has scarcely been equalled, and
exercised an influence which has rarely been surpassed, was evolved
without any assistance from the doctrine of a future life. Pagan
antiquity has bequeathed us few nobler treatises of morals than the "De
Officiis" of Cicero, which was avowedly an expansion of a work of
Panaetius. It has left us no grander example than that of Epictetus, the
sickly, deformed slave of a master who was notorious for his barbarity,
enfrancished late in life, but soon driven into exile by Domitian, who,
while sounding the very abyss of human misery, and looking forward to
death as to simple decomposition, was yet so filled with the sense of
the Divine presence, that his life was one continued hymn to Providence,
and his writings and his example, which appeared to his contemporaries
almost the ideal of human goodness, have not lost their consoling power
through all the ages and the vicissitudes they have survived.
There was, however, another form of immortality which exercised a much
greater influence among the Roman moralists.
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