ence, a little group of men peculiarly interesting,
because they form practically the first instance of an intellectual
coterie in the history of Rome. Their leader was the younger Scipio, who
had as his associates his friend Laelius, the poet Lucilius, whose
brilliant writings, submerged by the more brilliant satires of Horace,
form one of the most deplorable losses in Roman literature, and the
Stoic philosopher Panaitios of Rhodes. Terence had also belonged to the
circle, but he was now dead. Stoicism was the avowed philosophy of these
men, and their influence, especially that of Panaitios and Lucilius, did
much to popularise their chosen philosophical creed.

While Stoicism claimed superiority to religion and showed the
impossibility of attaching any value to religious knowledge, it
recognised the necessity of religion for the common people on grounds of
expediency, and effected a reconciliation between this denial of
religion on the one hand, and the recognition of it on the other, by
asserting that the religion of the state was justified not only by
expediency but much more by the fact that it was after all only the
presentation of the truths of Stoicism in a form which was intelligible
to the lower classes. Had this group of Scipio and his associates made
an effort to emphasise these particular doctrines of Stoicism in
relation to religion, the downfall of the state religion, which occurred
in the following century, might have been hindered. But for reasons,
which we shall see in a moment, this downfall could not have been
prevented, and it is doubtful whether the influence of any philosophical
system, even when supported by such prominent men, could have
perceptibly postponed the catastrophe. Meantime the only visible
contribution of Stoicism to the problem of religion was the growth under
her influence of the idea of a "double truth," one truth for the
intellectual classes and one for the common people, reaching its climax
in the phrase "It is expedient for the state to be deceived in matters
of religion" (_expedit igitur falli in religione civitatem_). This was
the attitude toward religion of the most intellectual men in the
community at the beginning of what was in many ways the most terrible
period in Rome's history.

The last century before Christ (more exactly B.C. 133-B.C. 27) is the
story of how Rome became an empire because she was no longer able to be
a republic; it is the history of the growth of one-