3. THE LATER SCEPTICISM.—Once more we meet with a peculiar Scepticism at the time when Grecian philosophy had wholly fallen to decay. To this time belong _Ænesidemus_, who probably—though this cannot be affirmed with certainty—lived but a little after Cicero; _Agrippa_, whose date is also uncertain, though subsequent to Ænesidemus, and _Sextus Empiricus_—_i. e._ a Grecian physician of the empiric sect, who probably flourished in the first half of the third century of the Christian era. These are the most significant names. Of these the last has the greatest interest for us, from two writings which he left behind him (the hypotyposes of Pyrrho in three books, and a treatise against the mathematicians in nine books), which are sources of much historical information. In these he has profusely collected every thing which the Scepticism of the ancients knew how to advance against the certainty of knowledge. SECTION XX. 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. SECTION XXI. NEW PLATONISM. In New Platonism, the ancient mind made its last and almost despairing attempt at a philosophy which should resolve the dualism between the subjective and the objective. The attempt was made by taking on the one side a subjective standpoint, like the other philosophies of the post-Aristotelian time (_cf._ § XVI 7); and on the other with the design to bring out objective determinations concerning the highest conceptions of metaphysics, and concerning the absolute; in other words, to sketch a system of absolute philosophy. In this respect the effort was made to copy the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, and the claim was set up by the new system to be a revival of the original Platonism. On both sides the new attempt formed the closing period of an ancient philosophy. It represents the last struggle, but at the same time the exhaustion of the ancient thinking and the dissolution of the old philosophy.