Yet the Epicurean and the Stoic schools were not the only ones which numbered adherents among the Romans. The representatives of the later Academy, Philo of Larissa and Antiochus of Ascalon, had many pupils. Cicero, Atticus, Brutus, and Varro had all heard the latter lecture at Athens. But the teachings of Plato had been greatly modified, inasmuch as these later Academicians had adopted the greater part of Stoicism into their philosophy. Furthermore the sceptical tendency which is so clearly marked among the Sophists of the fifth century had gradually developed during the fourth and third centuries into something like a philosophic system. The Sceptics, however, can hardly be called a school; they included those men in the various schools who doubted the possibility of attaining to absolute knowledge. Among the Romans they had close affinity with the tenets of the later Academicians on the one hand and with Stoic doctrines on the other. But their keen consciousness of the limitations of human knowledge made them also a factor in producing a certain agnosticism among the educated. As a matter of fact, the majority of the Romans were plain men, not given to speculation, with a fondness for the concrete rather than the abstract. They naturally selected from the various philosophies the elements which appealed to their practical sense, and which fortified them to meet the burdens and responsibilities of their daily life. On the whole Stoicism did this service more than any other of the current systems, and in the end, as we have already seen, Stoicism became the chief philosophy under the early Empire. The Stoics’ interest in grammar and logic also appealed to the legal character of the Roman mind; their system of duties, which were to be met unflinchingly, accorded with the Roman temper, and their cosmopolitan view found favor with a people that were masters of the greater part of the known world. But whatever the system of philosophy or selection of philosophic doctrines the Roman adopted, he found therein no warrant for a belief in the state religion. Philosophy could go no further than it did with Scaevola and Varro. The traditional religion was abandoned by the intellectual Romans; they substituted for it either agnosticism, some form of moral philosophy, or a pantheistic concept of the world. In truth the conquest of Greece over Rome was complete: in literature, art, philosophy, and religion captured Greece had taken her captor captive; by the beginning of our era Greek thought had penetrated to all the great centers of the Roman Empire, and under that long peace, which with comparatively few interruptions lasted for two centuries after the battle for Actium, philosophy and many new religions, including Christianity, travelled the great Roman roads from one end of the ancient world to the other.