If in the region of philosophy we include, with works of morals and politics, works on the principles and practice of rhetoric—a department to which the Romans attached an unusual, but not unaccountable, importance—we have to deal with three great names. These are Cicero, Seneca, and Quintilian. The last-mentioned concerns himself with oratory, the second with moral philosophy, while to Cicero nothing comes amiss. Here, as generally elsewhere, the Latin genius makes little claim to originality. When Cicero writes _On the Orator_ he is doubtless fully at home with his subject; nevertheless he is practically converting into Latin, with embellishments and enlargements, the system and terminology of the Greeks. His moral treatises, which are excellent reading in their kind, are but the expositions of an extremely clever man, who rightly thought that he was rendering no small service to his own countrymen by giving them in compact and intelligible form the substance of Greek philosophy. With a view to imparting lightness to his themes, and led by the example of Plato, he adopts the device of a pretended conversation or disputation, but it can scarcely be said that he lends much verisimilitude to the situation. The style everywhere is lofty, the thinking is serious and helpful, if not profound or original, and it is difficult to over-estimate the influence exercised by these books upon the later thought of Rome, of the Middle Ages, or of the Renaissance. Seneca the younger, writing under Claudius and Nero, is a philosopher in the more strict sense of the term. Living in an age which demanded striking phrase, point, and epigram, he is a master in that style. None the less he was a deep and earnest thinker. Cicero, in dealing with stoicism, is the highly intelligent amateur; Seneca is the expert, but not a pedantic one. His _Moral Epistles_ and his dialogues are essays touching upon matters of daily ethical concern, and both in their matter and its presentation they deserve a much wider recognition than they commonly receive. Some such recognition they did obtain at the Revival of Learning, when Englishmen read the classics more for what they contained than for the niceties of philology. It follows that the thoughts of Seneca, acknowledged or not, have played no small part in modern literature.