Let us turn to another illustration of how Cicero’s views altered and enlarged through personal experience until at last, even though he expressed himself through paraphrased passages, he succeeds in making us feel that he is giving us an epitome of his own personal convictions. For this purpose we may consider his statements about the survival of the soul after death. In his youth, especially during the civil wars when a public career seemed for a time closed, Cicero had devoted much time to the study of philosophy, and, being a normal Roman of the old type, to whom the actualities of life meant more than metaphysical speculation, for whom the world of realities was too full of interest to allow any time for mystical contemplation, he had naturally accepted the agnostic attitude of the New Academy toward the “unknowable.” With the New Academy he was theoretically ready to admit “probabilities,” even to act on probabilities, but epistemology had no appeal for him. Of course there are degrees of likelihood and the degrees are apt to vary with mood and occasion. When Cicero spoke before the populace he could see enough plausibility in the argument for Divinity to assume its existence for the time being. But when he wrote to his intimate friends the likelihood did not seem pressing enough to receive mention. He supposed with many other agnostic statesmen of his day that official worship of the gods was useful in the maintenance of the social system,[17] and this explains why, when he stood before the people, giving official advice, his faith seemed to expand. We need not take such faith very seriously. With the problem of the survival of the soul—except for a brief toying with a Platonic Myth in the _De Republica_—Cicero did not concern himself till very late in life. Like most Romans he explained to himself the phrases of the Greek mystics in a simple formula of “Gloria,” which, when analyzed, resolved itself into something like the “immortality of fame.”[18]