In the second book of his work, Cicero considers the relation of interest to duty; and having proved, at length, [765] that most that is advantageous and disadvantageous is brought on us by other men, he turns to the means by which we may gain the support of others, and by which affection, trust, and admiration may be secured. He reviews various kinds of services for individuals and the state, and embraces the opportunity to give expression to his abhorrence of despotism and republican servility to the people. The principles on which this review is conducted are such that objection can rarely be taken to them from the platform of modern morality. Yet the Stoic bias is unmistakeably present in the conception and support of the rules of life, and particularly in the definitions of various virtues; few of the moral judgments, however, are other than might have been expressed from the platform of the Platonic and Aristotelian ethics. [766] The same remark holds good of some other recorded points by means of which the Stoics gave a further expansion to their picture of the wise man. [767] Revolting as their tenets at times appear, there is yet little in their application that deviated from the moral ideas generally current. [(2) Cynicism of the Stoics.] [(a) Connection of Stoics with Cynics.] More peculiar, and at the same time more startling, is another feature about the Stoics. Let not too much be made of the fact that they, under certain circumstances, permitted a lie. [768] Were not Socrates and Plato, at least, of the same opinion? And, to be frank, we must admit that, although in this respect moral theories are strict enough, yet practice is commonly far too lax now. Very repulsive, however, are many assertions attributed to the Stoics, respecting the attitude of the wise man to the so-called intermediate things. Was not the very independence of externals, the indifference to everything but the moral state, which found expression in the doctrine of things indifferent and of the wise man’s apathy, at the root of that imperfection of life and principle which is so prominent in the Cynic School, the parent School of the Stoics? Granting that in the Stoic School this imperfection was toned down and supplemented by other elements, still the tendency thereto was too deeply rooted from its origin, and too closely bound up with its fundamental view of life, to be ever properly eradicated. It did not require, indeed, a Cynic life from its members; nay, more, it avowed that, except in rare cases, such a life ought not to be followed; [769] still the Cynic’s life was its ideal; and when it asserted that it was not necessary for a wise man to be a Cynic, it implied that, if once a Cynic, he would always be a Cynic. [770] Stoicism took for its patterns [771] Antisthenes and Diogenes quite as much as Socrates; even those who held, with Seneca, [772] that a philosopher ought to accommodate himself to prevailing customs, and,