"The lively imagination of the Greeks, and the out-door life of their primitive state, produced a number of tales and legends about the gods. Some of these were based on the tales with which their forefathers were familiar in their early home in Asia. The people lived in separate villages. Wandering minstrels and merchants carried these tales of gods and heroes from village to village. Poets then caught them up and adorned them with the touches of a livelier fancy. Thus, soon, a rich and luxuriant system of legendary lore was in possession of the whole people.
"Just as is the case with other nations, the beings called gods by the Greeks are but the personifications of the powers and objects of nature, and the legends but represent the courses of nature and its operations. To these primitive notions imagination afterwards added, and poetry clothed the whole with a warm glow. Thus was formed the popular Greek faith" (The World's Worship—Dobbins—pp. 150-157).
2. Religion of the Romans: General View: "Long before Rome was founded, Italy was peopled with an industrious class of farmers. But we have scarcely any records of those early times. Some of their gigantic buildings, lakes and canals remain, but these are almost all that is left. The religious ideas of these early settlers entered into and, to a great extent, moulded the religion of the Romans. The people of Italy did not have the same vivid imaginations and lively fancies as the people of Greece. Their early worship seems to have been of a more serious character than that of the Greeks. Their gods were freer from moral taint, and virtue rather than vice was required in followers of the Roman religions. The poetic art was little cultivated among them, or for that matter, in Rome of a later day. But Rome soon began to borrow from Greece, and to appropriate her gods, heroes and myths. There are no Italian-myths corresponding to those of Greece. In Virgil and Ovid, a few adventures of the Italian gods are related, but these are plainly limitations, or slight modifications, of the Greek stories." (The World's Worship, pp. 173-4).
3. Zeno: "Zeno, founder of the celebrated school of the Stoics, lived in the third century before our era (about 340—265 B. C.). He taught at Athens in a public porch (Stoa in Greek), from which circumstance comes the name applied to his disciples. The Stoics inculcated virtue for its own sake. They believed—and it would be difficult to frame a better creed—that 'man's chief business here is to do his duty.' They schooled themselves to bear with composure any lot that destiny might appoint. Any sign of emotion on account of calamity was considered unmanly. Thus a certain Stoic, when told of the sudden death of his son, is said merely to have remarked, 'Well, I never imagined that I had given life to an immortal.'
"Stoicism became a favorite system of thought with certain classes of the Romans, and under its teachings and doctrines were nourished some of the purest and loftiest characters produced by the pagan world." (Myers' General History, pp. 185-6).
4. Epicurus: "Epicurus (341—270 B. C.) taught, in opposition to the Stoics, that pleasure is the highest good. He recommended virtue, indeed, but only as a means for the attainment of pleasure; whereas the Stoics made virtue an end in itself. In other words, Epicurus said, "Be virtuous, because virtue will bring you the greatest amount of happiness;" Zeno said, "Be virtuous, because you ought to be."
"Epicurus had many followers in Greece, and his doctrines were eagerly embraced by many among the Romans during the later corrupt period of the Empire. Many of these disciples carried the doctrines of their master to an excess that he himself would have been the first to condemn. Allowing full indulgence to every appetite, their whole philosophy was expressed in the proverb, 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.'" (Myers' General History, p. 186).
5. The Stoics: The Stoics believed, (1) that there were gods; (2) they undertook to define their character and nature; (3) they held that the universe is governed by them, and (4) that they exercise a superintendency over human affairs.
The evidence for the existence of the gods they saw primarily in the universe itself. "What can be so plain and evident," they argued, "when we behold the heavens, and contemplate the celestial bodies, as the existence of some supreme, divine intelligence by which these things are governed?" "Were it otherwise," they said, "Ennius would not with universal approbation have said,
'Look up to the refulgent heavens above
Which all men call unanimously Jove—
* * * Of gods and men the sire.'"