This analogy with subsequent developments is aided, so far as it goes, by the admixture of a certain Platonic element with Virgil’s Stoicism, shown chiefly by the references to an antenatal existence of the soul, introduced for the purpose of bringing Rome’s future heroes on the scene. This, however, is the last example of an attempt on the part of a Roman writer to combine Plato’s teaching with Stoicism.[286] At a time when the Romans were more conscious of their literary dependence on Greece than was the case after the Augustan age had reached its zenith, they were probably drawn by the beauty of its literary form to study a system which could otherwise interest them but little. Thus, not only is Cicero full of admiration for Plato—as, indeed, might be expected with so highly cultivated a disciple of the Academy—but Cato, according to the well-known story, spent his last hours reading and re-reading the _Phaedo_; and his nephew Brutus also occupied an intermediate position between the Old Academy and the Porch. The Roman love of simplification and archaism induced subsequent thinkers either to let Platonism drop altogether, or to study those elements in which it differed from the pure naturalistic doctrine under their Pythagorean form. It may even be doubted whether Virgil’s psychology is not derived from Pythagoras rather than from Plato; Ovid, so far as he philosophises at all, is unquestionably a follower of the former;[287] and in the moral teaching of the Sextii, who flourished under Augustus, Pythagorean principles are blended with Stoicism.[288] It is another manifestation of the same effort to grasp every Greek doctrine by its roots, that Horace should proclaim himself the disciple of Aristippus rather than of Epicurus.[289] Even he, however, feels himself drawn with advancing years towards the nobler faith which was now carrying all before it.[290]