Thus, almost the same moral consequences and incitements to good could be drawn from a conditional and diminished immortality, as from the general eternity of pains and rewards which other thinkers taught. But the Stoics were not unanimous in adopting these doctrines. We do not clearly perceive how far they agreed in admitting that the soul, deprived of corporeal organs, was endowed with feeling and, in particular, kept an individual conscience connected with that possessed on earth. It is certain that a definitely negative tendency showed itself in Rome among the sectaries of Zeno. Panaetius, the friend of the Scipios, and one of the writers who did most to win the Romans over to the ideas of the Porch, here dissociated himself from his masters and absolutely denied personal survival.[35] This attitude was subsequently that of many Roman Stoics of those who represented the school’s tradition most purely. The master of the poet Persius, Cornutus, of whom a short work remains to us, declared that the soul died with the body, immediately.[36] Similarly, at a later date, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, although they sometimes seem to admit the possibility of survival, certainly incline rather to believe that souls are disintegrated and return to the elemental mass whence they were formed. Even Seneca, who is more swayed by other tendencies and whose wavering thought does not always remain consistent nor perspicuous, is not convinced of the truth of immortality. It is no more to him than a beautiful hope. How is it that Stoicism thus hesitated at a point on which the whole conception of human life seems to us to depend? It was that eschatological theories had in reality only a secondary value in this system, of which the essential part was not affected by their variability. True Stoicism placed the realisation of its ideal in this world. For it the aim of our existence here below was not preparation for death but the conquest of perfect virtue, which freed him who had attained to it from the passions and thus conferred on him independence and felicity. Man could, of himself, reach a complete beatitude which was not impaired by the limits placed to his duration. The sage, a blissful being, was a god on earth: heaven could give him nothing more. Therefore for these philosophers the answer to the question, “What becomes of us after death?” did not depend on moral considerations as it generally does for us. For them it rather followed on physical theories.