In these circumstances, new ethical ideals had arisen which affected all classes in the State. As Sir Samuel Dill has said in his charming sketch of Roman manners under the Julian, Flavian and Antonine emperors, “It has perhaps been too little recognized that in the first and second centuries there was a great propaganda of pagan morality running parallel to the evangelism of the Church[291].” But this ethical propaganda was an entirely lay affair, and the work not of the priests but of the philosophers[292]. It had, indeed, always been so in the Hellenic world, and while we find it exciting no surprise that a priest of the most sacred mysteries should be worse instead of better than other men[293], it was the philosophers to whom was committed what was later called the care of souls. Thus Alexander had recourse, when prostrated by self-reproach after the killing of Clitus, to the ministrations of Anaxarchus, who endeavoured to console him with the sophism that kings are not to be judged like other men[294]. So, too, we hear of the Stoic philosopher, Musonius Rufus, when the army of Vespasian was besieging Rome, accompanying the Senate’s embassy to the troops of Antonius, and preaching to them at the risk of his life upon the blessings of peace and the horrors of war[295]. Seneca, also, when about to die, endeavours to stay his friends’ lamentations by reminding them of the “rules of conduct” by which alone they may expect consolation, and bequeaths to them the example of his life[296]; while the “Stoic saint,” Thrasea, when the sentence of death reaches him, is occupied in listening to a discourse of Demetrius the Cynic on the nature of the soul and its separation from the body[297]. This shows an attitude of mind very different from the merely magical or, as we should say, superstitious belief in the efficacy of spells and ceremonies; and the example of Epictetus bears witness that it was that of slaves as well as of senators.