xistence," says Zeller, explaining this
point,[791] "when man becomes aware of the divine law, and recognises
its claim on him." Here, again, it is easy to see how illuminating would
be this conception of law for the Roman of Scipio's time. So far the
Roman idea and study of law (as I have elsewhere expressed it)[792] had
been of a crabbed, practical character, wanting in breadth of treatment,
destitute of any philosophical conception of the moral principles which
lie behind all law and government. The new doctrine called up life in
these dry bones, and started Roman lawyers, many of whom were Stoics
more or less pronounced, on a career of enlightened legal study which
has left one of the most valuable legacies inherited by the modern
world from ancient civilisation. In another way too it had, I think, an
immediate effect on Scipio himself and his circle, and on their mental
descendants, of whom Cicero was the most brilliant: it made them look on
the law and constitution of their State as eminently reasonable, and on
rebellion against it as unreason, or as the Romans call it, _lascivia_,
wanton disregard of principle. So far as I know, no great Roman lawyer
was ever a revolutionary like Catiline or Clodius, nor yet an obstinate
conservative like Cato, whose Stoicism was of the older and less
Romanised type; the two of whom we know most in the century following
the arrival of Panaetius were both wise, just, and moderate men, Mucius
Scaevola and Servius Sulpicius, of whom it may be truly said they
contributed as much to civilisation as the great military and political
leaders of the same period.[793]

There now remains the question whether this noble Stoic religion, as we
may fairly call it, with its ideas of the relation of Man to God and to
his fellow-men, had, after all, sufficient definiteness for a Roman to
act as a grip on his conscience and his conduct in his daily dealings
with others. It could deduce the existence and beauty of the social
virtues from its own principles; if Man partakes of the eternal Reason,
or, as they otherwise put it, if he is through his Reason a part of God
himself in the highest sense, and if God and Reason are in the highest
sense good, then in realising his own Reason, in obeying the voice of
the God within him,[794] he must be himself good by the natural instinct
of his own being. Accordingly, these social virtues, duties, _officia_,
as the Romans called them, were set forth by Panaetius