How much greater than the two Greeks is Mencius, when he is thinking out the ideal of the civilized State! He can make it as large as he likes and take men into its service with their best thoughts, because it results in the most natural way from a large-scale world-view of ethical activity. Plato and Aristotle, lacking such a world-view, can do no more than guess at the nature of a civilized State, and invent one for themselves. Plato’s _Republic_ is a mere [pg 052] curiosity. Aristotle’s _Politics_ is valuable, not on account of the theory of the civilized State which is there presented, but only for his magnificent practical analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of the various State-constitutions, and of their economic problems. The decadence of antiquity does not begin, then, with the suppression of the individual by the Empire, and its destruction of the normal mutual relations between the individual and the community. It sets in immediately after Socrates, because the ethical thinking which started with him cannot really lead the individual beyond himself, and set him as an effective force in the service of the moralization and the perfecting of social relations. There is no middle term between the ethic of enthusiasm and that of resignation. But an ethic of resignation cannot think out, much less bring into existence, a system of social relations which can be called really civilized. Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius “In imperial times Stoicism shrivels up into a moralizing popular philosophy” is what we are usually told in treatises about ancient philosophy. As a matter of fact what we have to deal with is by no means a shrivelling up, but a serious struggle for a living ethic which begins unexpectedly in the later period of Græco-Roman thought, and leads to an optimistic-ethical nature-philosophy. The pillars of this movement are L. Annæus Seneca (4 B.C.—A.D. 65), Nero’s teacher, who at the command of his pupil had to open his veins; the Phrygian slave, Epictetus (born _c_. A.D. 50), who in A.D. 94 was with all philosophers banished from Rome by Domitian; the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-180) who, brought up by pupils of Epictetus, defends the Empire at a time of great danger, and writes his philosophical _Meditations_ while in camp._(_8_)_ [pg 053] In their classical period Greek ethics offer us either egoistic considerations of advantage, or cold doctrines of virtue, or ascetic renunciation of the world, or resignation. In whichever direction they turn, they never lead men out beyond themselves. In Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, they lose this self-regarding character. Renouncing the spirit of the earlier time they develop to an ethic of universal brotherhood, and busy themselves with the immediate, altruistic relations of man to man. Whence comes this understanding for humanity, which is never seen in classical antiquity?