Sceptics, or decide with the Stoics,
sublimely speculate with Plato, or severely argue with Aristotle. The
pride of the adverse sects had fixed an unattainable term of moral
happiness and perfection; but the race was glorious and salutary; the
disciples of Zeno, and even those of Epicurus, were taught both to act
and to suffer; and the death of Petronius was not less effectual than
that of Seneca, to humble a tyrant by the discovery of his impotence.
The light of science could not indeed be confined within the walls of
Athens. Her incomparable writers address themselves to the human race;
the living masters emigrated to Italy and Asia; Berytus, in later
times, was devoted to the study of the law; astronomy and physic
were cultivated in the musaeum of Alexandria; but the Attic schools of
rhetoric and philosophy maintained their superior reputation from the
Peloponnesian war to the reign of Justinian. Athens, though situate in a
barren soil, possessed a pure air, a free navigation, and the monuments
of ancient art. That sacred retirement was seldom disturbed by the
business of trade or government; and the last of the Athenians were
distinguished by their lively wit, the purity of their taste and
language, their social manners, and some traces, at least in discourse,
of the magnanimity of their fathers. In the suburbs of the city, the
_academy_ of the Platonists, the _lycum_ of the Peripatetics, the
_portico_ of the Stoics, and the _garden_ of the Epicureans, were
planted with trees and decorated with statues; and the philosophers,
instead of being immured in a cloister, delivered their instructions in
spacious and pleasant walks, which, at different hours, were consecrated
to the exercises of the mind and body. The genius of the founders
still lived in those venerable seats; the ambition of succeeding to the
masters of human reason excited a generous emulation; and the merit of
the candidates was determined, on each vacancy, by the free voices of
an enlightened people. The Athenian professors were paid by their
disciples: according to their mutual wants and abilities, the price
appears to have varied; and Isocrates himself, who derides the avarice
of the sophists, required, in his school of rhetoric, about thirty
pounds from each of his hundred pupils. The wages of industry are just
and honorable, yet the same Isocrates shed tears at the first receipt
of a stipend: the Stoic might blush when he was hired to preach the
cont