man, but not for himself, but that by his wisdom he might diffuse benefits over every land and sea.... Had he preferred to lead a life apart from men, and to follow an idle wisdom, Hercules would indeed have been a Sophist, and no one would call him the son of Zeus. For God himself is never idle; were He to rest, the sky would cease to move, and the earth to produce, and the rivers to flow into the ocean, and the seasons to pursue their appointed course.”(626) But the Neoplatonists, though they sometimes spoke of civic virtues, regarded the condition of ecstasy as not only transcending, but including all, and that condition could only be arrived at by a passive life. The saying of Anaxagoras, that his mission was “to contemplate the sun, the stars, and the course of nature, and that this contemplation was wisdom,” was accepted as an epitome of their philosophy.(627) A senator named Rogantianus, who had followed the teaching of Plotinus, acquired so intense a disgust for the things of life, that he left all his property, refused to fulfil the duties of a prætor, abandoned his senatorial functions, and withdrew himself from every form of business and pleasure. Plotinus, instead of reproaching him, overwhelmed him with eulogy, selected him as his favourite disciple, and continually represented him as the model of a philosopher.(628) The two characteristics I have noticed—the abandonment of civic duties, and the discouragement of the critical spirit—had from a very early period been manifest in the Pythagorean school.(629) In the blending philosophies of the third and fourth centuries, they became continually more apparent. Plotinus was still an independent philosopher, inheriting the traditions of Greek thought, though not the traditions of Greek life, building his system avowedly by a rational method, and altogether rejecting theurgy or religious magic. His disciple, Porphyry, first made Neoplatonism anti-Christian, and, in his violent antipathy to the new faith, began to convert it into a religious system. Iamblichus, who was himself an Egyptian priest, completed the transformation,(630) resolved all moral discipline into theurgy, and sacrificed all reasoning to faith.(631) Julian attempted to realise the conception of a revived Paganism, blending with and purified by philosophy. In every form the appetite for miracles and for belief was displayed. The theory of dæmons completely superseded the old Stoical naturalism, which regarded the different Pagan divinities as allegories or personifications of the Divine attributes. The Platonic ethics were again, for the most part, in the ascendant, but they were deeply tinctured by a foreign element. Thus, suicide was condemned by the Neoplatonists, not merely on the principle of Plato, that it is an abandonment of the post of duty to which the Deity has called us, but also on the quietist ground, that perturbation is necessarily a pollution of