We all know how great a rôle the insistence upon fame and reputation played in the education of the aristocracy at Rome. Since parents and teachers had no religious authority and no fixed ethical sanctions to which to appeal in presenting the claims of duty, the examples of ancestral heroes and the _mos majorum_ came to be their decalogue. In their own homes children were shown the _imagines_ of their famous ancestors and taught to read the inscribed _tituli_ of their honors and triumphs. “Go thou and do likewise” was the obvious inference from daily lessons. It is safe to say that the constantly instilled respect for heroic ancestors was the most powerful factor in ethical teaching that ancient Rome knew. When Cicero so readily drops into the remark that what concerns him is what posterity will say of him a thousand years hence, he reveals the effectiveness of this moral pedagogy. Again and again in his speeches he frankly admits that _Gloria_, the immortality of fame, is what spurs him to incessant activity. The immortality of the “Choir Invisible”[19] was the only survival that the normal Roman of the cultured classes of the time expected. Cicero, who read very widely in Greek writers, had of course come in contact with many mystics. He had enjoyed the poetry of Plato’s myths; he was a good friend of Neo-Pythagoreans like Nigidius Figulus, with whom he had long conversations on this very subject at Ephesus in 51; he had also conversed with and read the works of Posidonius, who interpolated much oriental mysticism into his Stoicism. But all of this had left few traces in Cicero’s utterances, until a very great grief overwhelmed him.[20] In February of the year 45, two years before his death, his daughter Tullia, his one deep passion, died after years of suffering. Cicero gave in completely to his sorrow and withdrew to the forest of Astura, where he walked alone and communed with himself for several weeks. All his friends sent him letters of consolation, but they were typical Roman letters that gave little cheer, only reminding him that it was the duty of a Cicero to be strong, that life had little of value now that liberty was lost, that his own life was near its end. What he wanted was some ray of hope, and he sought the books of the mystics to give him what he needed. He read and pondered and temporarily accepted a “probability” that he had occasionally used in speeches to the populace, but never considered of use to himself. And he wrote it out in a _Consolatio_ in order to make it more persuasive. The basis of this pamphlet was Crantor’s argument, taken from Plato, that the soul reveals capacities that imply eternal existence.[21] But Cicero carried the argument to a conclusion that neither Crantor nor Plato would have accepted, the conclusion that Tullia still lived, would live eternally as a divine being, and if divine must have a shrine. This means that Cicero’s new faith, though suggested by