But what was the attitude of philosophy? Philosophy had contributed to the decline of the ancient gods. Had it been equally successful on the positive side? Had it been able to fill the void which its questionings had produced. The answer on the whole must be rendered in the negative. On the whole, it must be said that Greek philosophy was unsuccessful in its efforts to solve the riddle of the universe. The effort which it made was indeed imposing. Plato in particular endeavored to satisfy the deepest longings of the human soul; he attempted to provide an escape from the world of sense to the higher world of ideas. But the way of escape was open at best only to the few philosophical souls; the generality of men were left hopeless and helpless in the shadow-existence of the cave. And even the philosophers were not long satisfied with the Platonic solution. The philosophy of the Hellenistic age was either openly skeptical or materialistic, as is the case, for example, with Epicureanism, or at any rate it abandoned the great theoretical questions and busied itself chiefly with practical affairs. Epicureans and Stoics and Cynics were all interested chiefly, not in ontology or epistemology, but in ethics. At this point the first century was like the twentieth. The distrust of theory, the depreciation of theology, the exclusive interest in social and practical questions--these tendencies appear now as they appeared in the Hellenistic age. And now as well as then they are marks of intellectual decadence. But if the philosophy of the Hellenistic age offered no satisfactory solution of the riddle of the universe and no satisfaction for the deepest longings of the soul, it presented, on the other hand, no effective opposition to the religious current of the time. It had helped bring about that downfall of the Olympic gods, that sad neglect of Zeus and his altars which is described by Lucian in his wonderfully modern satires. But it was not able to check the rising power of the eastern religions. Indeed it entered into a curious alliance with the invaders. As early as the first century before Christ, Posidonius seems to have introduced an element of oriental mysticism into the philosophy of the Stoics, and in the succeeding centuries the process went on apace. The climax was reached, at the close of pagan antiquity, in that curious mixture of philosophy and charlatanism which is found in the neo-Platonic writers.