_Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cynicism_.--This pantheistic speculation inspires some of the dogmas of Stoicism; and for most of the Stoic writers and thinkers the concept of divinity was less that of a personal concrete Being than of a spiritual force or soul-power immanent in things; therefore while some of them tried to find a place in their {146} metaphysical system for the creations of the polytheism and even a justification for augury and divination, the impression left on our minds by the fragments that have come down to us of the religious speculation of the Stoa is as of a system alien and antipathetic to the popular theistic point of view and especially to the social religion of kin-group and city; and Zeno the founder is said to have protested against shrines and idols.[146.1] His protest was in vain; nor is there any clear indication that Stoicism had any influence on the religious thought and practice of the average man of the people; unless, indeed, the emergence of the cult of Αρετή, Virtue, in the second century B.C. at Pergamon and Smyrna was suggested by the strong theologic colouring that the Stoics gave to morality.[146.2] As for Epicureanism, it cannot be regarded normally as a religious force; if it touched the popular mind at all its influence must have been generally in the direction of atheism or indifferentism; the only signs that it did are occasional grave-inscriptions that breathe the Epicurean spirit of unperturbed quiescence in regard to the posthumous fate of the soul. The philosophic school that was most aggressively protestant against the popular creeds and cults appears to have been the Cynic, mordant and outspoken criticism being characteristic of this sect. We have record of Diogenes’ contempt for the Eleusinian mysteries, of Antisthenes’ disdain for the Great Mother of Phrygia and her mendicant priests; and the fragments in a newly discovered papyrus of {147} a treatise by Kerkidas,[147.1] the Cynic philosopher and statesman of Megalopolis in the third century B.C., contain a theory which reduces personal deities to impotent instruments of Fate and would substitute for Zeus and his colleagues certain divinised abstractions, such as Nemesis and Μετάδως; the latter term, if the reading is sound, seems to denote the Spirit of Unselfishness or Sacrifice, an interesting and potentially valuable idea, but at this time still-born.