When it got to court, Stoicism put away its primitive roughness. “Plain living and high thinking” became the accepted creed among the brilliant society of which Faustina was the centre and the exemplar; just as now in England ritualism and “the Rome-ward movement” become from time to time the tone amongst elegant blue-stockings of both sexes. But of course in Rome, as in London, it would have been bad taste to take seriously what was, with them, at least, merely an interesting sentiment. Society now turns out to hear the newest preacher on the newest theology, or the fashionable and good-looking preacher on any or no theology. So, too, then; Faustina and the Roman ladies came in all the glory of flowered silk and rare jewels to the Temple of Peace, there to hear Rusticus or Fronto, or the Emperor Aurelius himself, lecturing on the vanity of vanities, the shortness of life, the blessedness of renunciation. Great families had each its philosopher--a kind of family chaplain; and the great ladies came in their sedan chairs to consult their philosophical director on the latest freaks of their fancy. This interest in philosophy was partly the cause, partly the effect, of a general movement towards more humane views. The hard pagan world was beginning to soften; and this humanity was the greatest glory of the Golden Age. The Stoics preached the brotherhood of man, and sympathy with men, as men. Hence charity too became part of the Time-Spirit and showed itself in milder legislation and in beneficent institutions. The great ones of the world at last took notice of the weak and the outcast; the stern rule of might and the pitiless destruction of the “unfit” at last yielded to altruistic sentiments. The slave, the orphan, and woman were no longer to be the prey of society. In his legislation in favour of the oppressed Marcus Aurelius did but carry on the work begun by Antoninus and his excellent council of jurists. Their first care was to make easier the lot of the slave. Seneca had said: “All men, if you only go back to their beginnings, have the gods for their fathers”; and Epictetus: “The slave like you is the son of Zeus”; and it was in this spirit of reverence for his fellow-man as his brother and his equal that Marcus sought to confer on him, in addition to a theoretical fraternity and equality, the third of the trinity--freedom. The master was no longer allowed absolute power of life and death over his slaves; the slave was recognised as having rights; and enfranchisement was encouraged. As the condition of the slave, so too that of women and orphans was improved. The inhuman position of woman under old Roman law, by which she was practically excluded from recognition as a member of the family, was altered by laws conferring on her rights of property; while orphans were provided for by numerous charitable institutions.