In the despotic monarchies of the successors of Alexander there was little room for the growth and exercise of those virtues of citizenship which had been nourished in the free air of the ancient city. The virtues now in vogue and fostered by the new monarchical régime were no longer those of the patriot citizen and the patriot warrior, but those of the pliant subject, the servile courtier, and the mercenary soldier. In Plutarch’s _Lives_, out of the twenty heroes and worthies whom the biographer selected as the noblest representatives of the virtues most highly esteemed by the Greeks, we find only two who lived after the general loss of Greek freedom, and these[511] were men whose characters were formed in the cities of the Achæan League, in which the ancient liberties of Hellas were maintained till the rise of the Roman power. It could not be otherwise, so completely were the fortunes of the Greek moral ideal bound up with the fortunes of the Greek city state. But besides the decay of the free city there were other causes contributing to the moral decadence which marked Hellenism in the Alexandrian Age. The close contact of Greek culture with the corrupt society of the Orient had disastrous consequences for Greek morality. The principal courts of the Hellenistic East were plague spots of moral contagion. The virus of gross sensual immorality was communicated to Greece, and Greek society was fatally infected. The Orontes emptied into the Ilissus and the Eurotas, as later it emptied into the Tiber. And still another contributing cause of the moral decline in Hellas was the sudden acquisition of vast individual and social wealth through the conquest and exploitation of the East. The morals of no age or people have been proof against suddenly acquired riches. One explanation of this is that new and untried sources of pleasure, most often illicit sensuous pleasure, are opened up, and the temptation to selfish indulgence is irresistible, coming as it does before self-restraint, in the face of these unaccustomed solicitations, has become a habit. Still another cause of the moral degeneracy of the age, one which we shall have occasion to speak of more at length a little further on, is to be sought in the fact that the period was one of transition in religion as well as in politics and social relations. Greek morality was, it is true, based in the main upon the old system of independent city life. Yet Greek morality was in a way braced by religion and even in part based upon it. Now in the Alexandrian Age the religious system of Hellas was undergoing a process of disintegration. Men were losing faith in their ancestral gods. Philosophic skepticism was widespread. Inevitably this movement in the religious realm caused all that part of the moral system dependent in any degree upon the old religious doctrines and teachings to weaken and crumble away. [Sidenote: Ethical products of the Hellenistic Age: Stoicism and Epicureanism]