Thenceforth the most noted statesmen and scholars professed the Stoic philosophy--among others Stilo and Quintus Scaevola, the founders of scientific philology and of scientific jurisprudence.

The scholastic formality of system, which thenceforth prevails at least externally in these professional sciences and is especially associated with a fanciful, charade-like, insipid method of etymologizing, descends from the Stoa.

But infinitely more important was the new state-philosophy and state-religion, which emanated from the blending of the Stoic philosophy and the Roman religion.

The speculative element, from the first impressed with but little energy on the system of Zeno, and still further weakened when that system found admission to Rome--after the Greek schoolmasters had already for a century been busied in driving this philosophy into boys' heads and thereby driving the spirit out of it--fell completely into the shade in Rome, where nobody speculated but the money-changers; little more was said as to the ideal development of the God ruling in the soul of man, or of the divine world-law.

The Stoic philosophers showed themselves not insensible to the very lucrative distinction of seeing their system raised into the semi-official Roman state- philosophy, and proved altogether more pliant than from their rigorous principles we should have expected.