A humanity common with our own brings us into closest sympathy with certain great personalities of this antique world. Differences of time, race, civilization, are powerless to prevent our intimate friendship and reverence for Homer, Sophocles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Epictetus. Homer shows the opening of eyes and heart to this whole wonderful world of nature and of man. Sophocles sees human life in its depth of suffering and height of achievement. He views mingled spectacle with profound reverence, sure that through it all is working some divine power. Goodness is dear to the gods, wickedness is abhorrent to them. But the good man is often unhappy,--from strange inheritance of curse, or from complication of events which no wisdom can baffle. Yet from the discipline of suffering emerges the noblest character, and over the grave itself play gleams of hope, faint but celestial. In Socrates, we see the man who having in himself attained a solid and noble goodness, addresses all his powers to finding a clear road by which all men may be led into goodness. He first propounds in clearness the most important question of humanity,--how shall man by reason and by will become master of life? Plato takes up the question after him, and follows it with an intellect unequaled in its imaginative flight. Plato lighted the fire which has burned high in the enthusiasts of the spirit,--the mystics, the dreamers, the idealists. Aristotle confined himself to the homelier province where demonstration is possible, and laid the foundation of logic and of natural science. Lucretius resolutely puts away from him the whole pageant of fictitious religion. He scouts its terrors, and scorns to depend on unreal consolation. He addresses himself to the intellectual problem of the universe, and decides that all is ruled by material laws. In Epictetus man reverts from the problem of the universe to the problem of the soul. The beauty of the Greek world has faded, the stern Roman world has trained its best spirits to live with resolute self-mastery. The mythologic gods are no longer worth talking about for serious men. But here is the great actual business of living,--it can be met in manly temper, and be made a scene of lofty satisfaction and serene tranquillity. Epictetus was the consummate expression of that Stoic philosophy in which were blended the clearness of Greek thought and the austerity of the best Roman life. Stoicism reverted from all universe-schemes, spiritual or materialist, to the conduct of human life which Socrates had propounded as the essential theme. The Stoic affirmed that all good and evil reside for man in his own will, and that simply in always choosing the right rather than the wrong he may find supreme satisfaction. Epictetus expresses this in the constant tone of heroism and victory. In the more feminine nature of Marcus Aurelius the same ideas yield a beautiful fidelity along with a habitual sadness.