THE ROMANS.
The Romans have taken no independent part in the progress of philosophy.
After Grecian philosophy and literature had begun to gain a foothold
among them, and especially after three distinguished representatives of
Attic culture and eloquence—Carneades the Academician, Critolaus the
Peripatetic, and Diogenes the Stoic—had appeared in Rome as envoys from
Athens; and after Greece, a few years later, had become a Roman
province, and thus outwardly in a close connection with Rome, almost all
the more significant systems of Grecian philosophy, especially the
Epicurean (Lucretius), and the Stoic (Seneca), flourished and found
adherents in Rome, though without gaining any real philosophical
progress. The Romish philosophizing is wholly eclectic, as is seen in
Cicero, the most important and influential philosophic writer among the
Romans. But the popular philosophy of this man and of the minds akin to
him cannot be strongly assailed, for, notwithstanding its want of
originality and logical sequence, it gave philosophy a broad
dissemination, and made it a means of universal culture.