Even among the Athenians, by whom philosophy was, in many cases, cultivated to the exclusion of every active profession, intellectual amusement, not the discovery of Truth, was the principal object of their discussions. That we must thus account for the ensnaring questions and sophistical reasonings of which their disputations consisted, has been noticed by writers on Logic;[133] and it was their extension of this system to the case of morals which brought upon their Sophists the irony of Socrates and the sterner rebuke of Aristotle. But if this took place in a state of society in which the love of speculation pervaded all ranks, much more was it to be expected among the Romans, who, busied as they were in political enterprises, and deficient in philosophical acuteness, had neither time nor inclination for abstruse investigations; and who considered philosophy simply as one of the many fashions introduced from Greece, "a sort of table furniture," as Warburton well expresses it, a mere refinement in the arts of social enjoyment.[134] This character it bore both among friends and enemies. Hence the popularity which attended the three Athenian philosophers who had come to Rome on an embassy from their native city; and hence the inflexible determination with which Cato procured their dismissal, through fear, as Plutarch tells us,[135] lest their arts of disputation should corrupt the Roman youth. And when at length, by the authority of Scipio,[136] the literary treasures of Sylla, and the patronage of Lucullus, philosophical studies had gradually received the countenance of the higher classes of their countrymen, still, in consistency with the principle above laid down, we find them determined in their adoption of this or that system, not so much by the harmony of its parts, or by the plausibility of its reasonings, as by its suitableness to the particular profession and political station to which they severally belonged. Thus, because the Stoics were more minute than other sects in inculcating the moral and social duties, we find the Roman jurisconsults professing themselves followers of Zeno;[137] the orators, on the contrary, adopted the disputatious system of the later Academics;[138] while Epicurus was the master of the idle and the wealthy. Hence, too, they confined the profession of philosophical science to Greek teachers; considering them the sole proprietors, as it were, of a foreign and expensive luxury, which the vanquished might suitably have the duty of furnishing, and which the conquerors could well afford to purchase.