The first of these was the subjection of the whole East to the influence of the Greek mind by the conquest of Alexander, the effect of which continued in the kingdoms carried on by his successors. Originally the civil position of the Greek, as the free citizen of a free state, had been all in all to him. His country was his single measure. But during the lifetime of Plato and Aristotle this position had been more and more altering. The philosophy of Zeno and Epicurus was set up by men who had lost it altogether, who were thrown back on themselves, on the intrinsic nature of man, for support. Their inmost thought was how to produce tranquillity of mind, and so far as might be, happiness, for man, in something independent of his civil position. The loss of self-government had opened to them perforce a field far wider than the narrow confines of a provincial citizenship. Henceforth the schools of Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus issued their mental legislation not for the inhabitant of Attica, but for all that fusion of races which occupied the eastern coasts of the Mediterranean, was ruled by Greek potentates, and spoke the Hellenic tongue. Thus the ground taken up by philosophy was at once religious and cosmopolitan; the former because it attempted to deal with the nature of man as man, and to give him inward contentment, the latter because the mind, which used as its organ the Greek language, swayed large and independent empires, embracing various races of men. Then, if ever, it might have been expected that heathenism would make a great spring,(447) would cast aside what was local and accidental in the various customs, races, and beliefs brought under the fusing influence of one spirit, and idealise out of them a religion bearing the stamp and showing the force of that human reason of which Greece was the great representative. But the three centuries which witnessed the birth, the vigorous growth, and the incessant contests of the schools of Zeno and Epicurus, together with the scepticism which from Plato’s chair passed judgment on them both, produced no such result, but rather terminated in that balancing of opposite systems, and the selection of fragments from each, which we have seen in Cicero.