In Epictetus also this deepened and widened notion of duty is to be found. Marcus Aurelius does not even consider any impossibility of taking part in public life. In him there speaks the ruler who feels himself to be the servant of the State. His ideal is the citizen who “from one activity which makes his fellow-citizens happier goes on to another, and undertakes with alacrity anything whatever that the State lays upon him.” “Do what is needed, and what is bidden by the reason of a being who is destined by nature to membership of a State, and do it as it is bidden.” In the middle of the second century A.D. ancient thought arrives at an optimistic-ethical world-view which holds within itself living ideals of civilization, and therefore anticipates those which later on in the eighteenth century will bring into activity so mighty and universal a movement of civilization. But for the men of the Græco-Roman world it comes too late. It does not permeate the masses, but remains the private possession of an _élite_. It cannot permeate the masses, because there are forces at work among them with which it cannot combine. It is true, indeed, that the ethic of the later Stoicism is so near akin to the universal charity of the Christian ethic, that by the tradition of later times Seneca is declared to be a Christian, and that the Church father, Augustine, holds up the life of the heathen emperor, Marcus Aurelius, as an example for Christians. Yet the two movements cannot amalgamate, but have [pg 059] to fight each other. Marcus Aurelius is responsible for most terrible persecutions of Christians, and Christianity on its side declares war to the knife against the Porch. Why this strange fatality? Because Christianity is dualistic and pessimistic, the ethic of Stoicism is monistic and optimistic. Christianity abandons the natural world as evil, the later Stoics idealize it. It helps not at all that their ethical teaching is almost identical. Each appears as part of a world-view which is irreconcilable with that of the other. All contradictions in the world may be concealed, but not that between two world-views, and the struggle ends with the annihilation of the optimistic-ethical world-view of the Stoics, which is defended by officers without an army. The attempt that was undertaken as the ancient world was coming to an end, to restore the Empire and make it an empire as wide as mankind, was a failure.