Nor was this moral evolution confined to ethical theory; these precepts of the moralists found generous embodiment in practice. Especially was the age of the Antonines a benevolent age, one in which all kinds of charities abounded. Respecting private benefactions in this period Professor Samuel Dill asserts that we may well doubt whether they were less numerous and generous than at the present day, and that “there has probably seldom been a time when wealth was more generally regarded as a trust, a possession in which the community at large has a right to share.”[553] These numerous gifts and legacies assumed the form of baths, theaters, libraries, markets, colonnades, aqueducts, fountains, temples, basilicas, and other monuments of utility or adornment. The motives which led to all this public giving were of course mixed, just as are the motives of givers of to-day, but we may without much hesitation assume with the historian Dill that they sprang largely from genuine altruistic feeling, from a recognition of the true uses of wealth, and from a sense of the duty of the rich to the poor and dependent--from the same motives, in a word, that a century or two later were to cover these same lands with churches and monasteries and oratories.[554] [Sidenote: The broadening movement: ethical universalism as the outcome of the world empire and of Stoicism] The second important ethical movement in the pre-Christian Roman world consisted, as we have seen, in the widening of the moral sympathies. The two most efficient causes of this movement were the establishment of the world empire and the ascendancy at Rome of Greek philosophy, particularly the philosophy of the Stoics.