The moral reformation officially inaugurated by Augustus appears, in the light of these indications, as corresponding to an increased tendency to virtue actually leavening Græco-Roman society. The formal acts of the Cæsar, the policy of his ministers, the religious sentiment of Horace and Virgil, the Stoic fervour of Seneca and Lucan, the martyr spirit of the Thraseas and the Arrias, the tyrannizing morality of Juvenal, the kindly humanity of Pliny the Younger, the missionary enthusiasm of Dion, the gentle persuasiveness of Plutarch, are all common indications of the good that still interfused the Roman world; all point, as indeed, many other signs also point, to the existence of a widespread belief that virtuous ideals and virtuous actions were an inheritance of which mankind ought not to allow itself to be easily deprived. Philosophers and politicians, as they were at one in recognizing the value of this heritage, so they were also at one touching the general means by which its precious elements were to be invigorated and maintained. As we have already suggested, it is a remarkable characteristic of the philosophic writers of this period—of Seneca and Dion, of Plutarch, and even of Epictetus—that there is in them no pedantic adhesion to the fixed tenets of a particular school. The half-playful boast of Horace at one end of the period—_nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri_[130]—is reiterated with something of sarcastic emphasis in Epictetus at the other: “Virtue does not consist in having understood Chrysippus.”[131] Seneca gives expression to this prevalent spirit of compromise with great courage and clearness. After quoting _suo more_ a certain _nobilis sententia_ of Epicurus, he says: “You must not regard these expressions as peculiar to Epicurus; they are common property. The practice which obtains in the Senate should, I think, be adopted in Philosophy. When a speaker says something with which I partly agree, I ask him to compromise, and then I go with him.”[132] Anything in the whole gathered wealth of the Past which promised support to a man in his efforts to regulate his life in accordance with the dictates of reason and virtue was welcomed and made available for the uses of morality by the selective power of Philosophy. Hence Plutarch levies contributions on philosophers, poets, legislators; on Hellenic and Barbarian Religions; on Mysteries, Oracles, private utterances; on the whole complex civilization of the Græco-Roman world, and the civilizations which it had absorbed or dominated; on everything, in fact, which, from its antiquity, or its possession of national or individual authority, could be made available for establishing the practice of virtue on the sanction of an ancient and inalienable foundation. The object of the following pages is to scrutinize the results of this appeal to the Past, as they are presented in the “Ethics” of Plutarch, and to arrange in some kind of order the various elements of