[512] This ascetic tendency in Stoicism is doubtless to be attributed to the influence of the Orient upon Greek life and thought.
[513] Consistently so, since only through self-control and the avoidance of all excesses of passion, appetite, and desires can one maintain that tranquillity of mind which is the condition precedent of happiness.
[514] Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 228.
[515] Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece, p. 264. The author contrasts this humaneness of the laws of the Athenian democracy four centuries before Christ with the atrocious cruelty of the criminal laws of Christian Europe down almost to the nineteenth century.
[516] Social Life in Greece (1888), p. 269.
[517] Ibid. p. 554.
[518] The Apostle Paul at Athens, seeking common ground with his hearers for the doctrine he preached that God hath made of one blood all nations of men, finds it in the familiar line of the Stoic Cleanthes—“We are the offspring of God.”
[519] Plutarch died about 40 A.D.
[520] “From contact with the Greeks, therefore, Christianity obtained this support, that an ideal long known to the Western world, the Stoic ideal, was found to correspond with it, so that the preaching of the Apostles was in this respect not out of harmony with the wants and aspirations of the higher and better minds of the age.”—Mahaffy, Progress of Hellenism in Alexander’s Empire (1905), p. 146.
[521] “The essential oneness of human moral experience has shown itself in the ethical results achieved by these various peoples.”—Toy, Judaism and Christianity (1891), p. 337.