To give a true exposition of the Stoic philosophy
is a work of more than ordinary difficulty, owing to
the circumstance that all the writings of the earlier
Stoics, with the exception of a few fragments, have
been lost.! Those Stoics whose complete works are
still extant—-Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius,
Heraclitus, Cornutus—lived under the Roman Em-
pire, and therefore belong to a time in which all
Schools alike, exposed to foreign influences, had
either surrendered their original peculiarities, or else
had thrown them into the background, and substi-
tuted new ones in their place. The same remark
applies to writers like Cicero, Plutarch, Diogenes,
Sextus Empiricus, and the commentators on Aris-
totle, who may be considered as authorities at second
hand for the teaching of the Stoics; but it is more
than doubtful whether everything which they men-
tion as Stoic teaching really belongs to the older


1 Simpl.in Cat. Schol.in Arist, καὶ τὰ πλεῖστα τῶν ovyypopudtor
49, a, 16, says: παρὰ τοῖς Zrwi- ἐπιλέλοιπεν.
κοῖς, ὧν ἐφ᾽ ἡμῶν καὶ ἡ διδασκαλία


|


REVIEW OF AUTHORITIES.
