While
the Epicurean poet painted in magnificent language the perpetual
progress of mankind, the Stoic was essentially retrospective, and
exhausted his strength in vain efforts to restore the simplicity of a
by-gone age. While, too, the school of Zeno produced many of the best
and greatest men who have ever lived, it must be acknowledged that its
records exhibit a rather unusual number of examples of high professions
falsified in action, and of men who, displaying in some forms the most
undoubted and transcendent virtue, fell in others far below the average
of mankind. The elder Cato, who, though not a philosopher, was a model
of philosophers, was conspicuous for his inhumanity to his slaves.
Brutus was one of the most extortionate usurers of his time, and several
citizens of Salamis died of starvation, imprisoned because they could
not pay the sum he demanded. No one eulogised more eloquently the
austere simplicity of life which stoicism advocated than Sallust, who in
a corrupt age was notorious for his rapacity. Seneca himself was
constitutionally a nervous and timid man, endeavouring, not always with
success, to support himself by a sublime philosophy.
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