Though he was proverbially sober and chaste, he was assailed by various enemies in his lifetime. Arcesilaus and Carneades of the New Academy, and in his latter years, Epicurus, who disliked the philosophy and pride of Zeno, were his powerful antagonists. Little credit is due, however, to the abuse which passed on both sides. He lived to old age. When he died is matter of doubt. He is said to have been alive in the 130th Olympiad. In his 98th year, as he was leaving his school, he stumbled and fell, and broke one of his fingers in the fall. Pain so affected him that he exclaimed, striking the earth, Ἔρχομαι, τί μ’ ἀΰεις; “I come, why dost thou call me?” He went home and strangled himself, about the year B.C. 260. In trying, at the present day, to estimate the teaching of Zeno, it is necessary for us to consider the circumstances of the age in which he lived and taught, and to remember also that it is difficult to find out how much of the later Stoic philosophy really came from him. His writings were numerous[12], but they are lost. His teaching seems to have been modified, and sometimes even changed altogether, by Chrysippus. Indeed the later professed disciples of the school seldom went back to the works of the first Stoic. Let us, as well as we can, however, lay hold of the circumstances in which he was placed as a philosopher, and the alterations he introduced. He began his course at a time of decay in Greece, and when the mind of men was become sceptical as to all things in heaven and earth. Philosophers had so quarrelled with one another’s dogmas, and proved one another wrong so often, that men began to doubt if there were any foundation on which to rest. GOD was educating the world for the reception of the great truths of revelation. He did this by showing men how helpless they were in divine things by their own unaided nature, how contradictory their speculations, how far short of the truth the highest attainments of human intellects, how uncertain it was which was truth of the various theories proposed, so that men doubted about all truth. Zeno under these circumstances did a great work in educating the world still further, and preparing it for the great Truth. He was to the people of his day in some degree what Socrates was to the men of his age. He brought back the influence of reason and common sense, rescuing them from the Pyrrhonists, as Socrates did from the Sophists. Like the son of Sophroniscus, also, the founder of the Stoics turned men from mere speculation to action. Socrates taught men to look within themselves, and created a desire to live as became them. He was an ethical reformer, and so turned men away from the guesses of a so-called philosophy, and from the scepticism consequent on failure. Victor Cousin has well said, “La philosophie Grecque avait été d’abord une philosophie de la nature; arrivée à sa maturité elle change de caractère et de direction et elle devient une philosophie morale, sociale, humaine.