Part 2 — CHAPTER III. HISTORY OF THE STOICS UNTIL THE END OF THE SECOND CENTURY B.C.

A striking feature in the history of the post-Aristotelian philosophy, and one which at the same time brings forcibly home the thorough change in its surroundings, is the fact that so many of its representatives come from eastern countries in which Greek and Oriental modes of thought met and mingled. Although for centuries Athens still continued to have the reputation of being the chief seat of Greek philosophy, and did not cease to be one of the most important seminaries of philosophy, even when it had to share that reputation with other cities, such as Alexandria, Rome, Rhodes, and Tarsus, yet at Athens itself there were teachers not a few whose foreign extraction indicates the age of Hellenism. This remark applies primarily to the later Neoplatonic School: next to it it is of none more true than of the Stoic. With this fact may be also associated the world-citizenship of this School, though it would be unfair to attribute a general characteristic of the then state of the world to purely external circumstances. Nearly all the most important Stoics before the Christian era belong by birth to Asia Minor, to Syria, and to the islands of the Eastern Archipelago. Then follow a series of Roman Stoics, by the side of whom the Phrygian Epictetus occupies a prominent place; but Greece proper is represented only by men of third or fourth rate capacity.