7. [Strabo, a native of Amasia, wrote, in the age of Augustus and Tiberius, a Geography, which he divided into seventeen books, wherein he describes the origin, manners, religion, and government of the most celebrated nations of the ancient world, and the foundation and minute history of the most renowned cities and provinces then in existence.]

8. Plutarch, a native of Chæronéa, in Bœotia, flourished in the reign of Nero. His Lives of Illustrious Men is one of the most valuable of the literary works of the ancients; introducing us to an acquaintance with the private character and manners of those eminent persons whose public achievements are recorded by professed historians. His morality is excellent; his style, though not eloquent, clear and energetic,

9. Arrian [a philosopher of Nicomedia], wrote in the reign of Adrian, seven books of the wars of Alexandria, with great judgment and fidelity (his narrative being composed on the authority of Aristobulus and Ptolemy, two of Alexander's principal officers). His style is unadorned, but chaste, perspicuous, and manly.

XXIII. Of the Greek Philosophers.

1. After the time of Homer and Hesiod, the increasing relish for poetical composition gave rise to a set of men termed rhapsodists, whose employment was to recite at the games and festivals the compositions of the older poets, and to comment on their merits and explain their doctrines. Some of these, founding schools of instruction, were dignified by their pupils with the epithet of sophists, or teachers of wisdom.

2. The most ancient school of philosophy was that founded by Thales [of Miletus], 640 B.C., and termed the Ionic. Thales is celebrated for his knowledge both in geometry and astronomy. His metaphysical doctrines are but imperfectly known. He taught the belief of a First Cause, and an overruling Providence; but supposed the Divinity to animate the universe, as the soul does the body. The moral doctrines of the Ionic school were pure and rational. The most eminent of the disciples of Thales were Anaximander and Anaxagoras [the tutor of Pericles.] 3. Soon after the Ionic arose the Italian sect, founded by Pythagoras, who was born about 586 B.C. He is supposed to have derived much of his knowledge from Egypt;

and he had, like the Egyptian priests, a public doctrine for the people, and a private for his disciples: the former a good system of morals, the latter probably unintelligible mystery. His notions of Divinity were akin to those of Thales; but he believed in the eternity of the universe, and its co-existence with the Deity. He taught the transmigration of the soul through different bodies. His disciples lived in common; they abstained rigorously from the flesh of animals; they held music in high estimation, as a corrective of the passions. Pythagoras believed the earth to be a sphere, the planets to be inhabited, and the fixed stars to be the suns and centres of other systems. His most eminent followers were Empedocles, Epicharmus, Ocellus Lucánus, Timéus, Archy tus.

4. The Eleatic sect was founded by Xenophanes, about 500 B.C. [538]. Its chief supporters were Parmenides, Zéno, and Leucippus, citizens of Elea* [in Western Italy]. The metaphysical notions of this sect were utterly unintelligible. They maintained, that things had neither beginning, end, nor any change; and that all the changes we perceive are in our own senses. Yet Leucippus taught the doctrine of atoms, from whence he supposed all material substances to be formed. Of this sect were Democritus and Heraclitus.

5. The Socratic school arose from the Ionic. Socrates died 401 B.C., the wisest, the most virtuous of the Greeks. He exploded the futile logic of the sophists, which consisted of a set of general arguments applicable to all manner of questions, and by which they could, with an appearance of plausibility, maintain either side of any proposition. Socrates always brought his antagonist to particulars; beginning with a simple and undeniable position, which being granted, another followed equally undeniable, till the disputant was conducted step by step, by his own concessions, to that side of the question on which lay the truth. His rivals lost all credit as philosophers, but had influence to procure the destruction of the man who had exposed them. The doctrines of Socrates are to be learned from Pláto and Xenophon. He taught the belief of a First Cause, whose beneficence is equal to his power, the Creator and Ruler of the universe. He incul cated the moral agency of man, the immortality of the

A city, Niebuhr remarks, not famous for its wars, but for its profound thinkers.-ED.

soul, and a future state of reward and punishment. He exploded the polytheistic superstitions of his country, and thence became the victim of an accusation of impiety. (See sect. 13, § 5.)

6. The morality of Socrates was successfully cultivated by the Cyrenaic sect, but was pushed the length of extravagance by the Cynics. Virtue, in their opinion, consisted in renouncing all the conveniencies of life. They clothed themselves in rags, slept and ate in the streets, or wandered about the country with a stick and a knapsack. They condemned all knowledge as useless. They associated impudence with ignorance, and indulged themselves in scurrility and invective without restraint.*

7. The Megarean sect were the happy inventors of logical syllogism, or the art of quibbling.

8. The Academic sect had Plato [a native of Ægina] for its founder; a philosopher whose doctrines have had a more extensive empire over the minds of mankind than those of any other among the ancients. This is in part owing to their intrinsic merit, and in part to the eloquence with which they have been propounded. Plato had the most sublime ideas of the Divinity and his attributes. He taught that the human soul was a portion of the Divinity, and that this alliance with the eternal mind might be improved into actual intercourse with the Supreme Being, by abstracting the soul from all the corruptions it derives from the body; a doctrine highly flattering to the pride of man, and generating that mystical enthusiasm which has the most powerful empire over a warm imagination.

9. The Platonic philosophy found its chief opponents in four remarkable sects, the Peripatetic, the Sceptic, the Stoic, and the Epicurean.

10. Aristotle, [a native of Stagyra in Thrace, a city at that time under the dominion of Macedonia], was the founder of the Peripatetic sect, he was also the tutor of Alexander the Great, and established his school in the Lycéum at Athens; a philosopher whose tenets have found more zealous partizans, and more rancorous opponents, than those of any other. His Metaphysics, from the sententious brevity of his expression, are extremely obscure, and have given rise to numberless commentaries. The

* The remarks in the text rather apply to Diogenes, who carried the doctrines of this school to such unreasonable extremes as soon to bring it into disrepute.-ED.

best analysis of his logic is given by Dr. Reid in LorKames's Sketches of the History of Man. His physica: works are the result of great observation and acquaintance with nature; and his critical writings, as his Poetics and Art of Rhetoric, display both taste and judgment. It is the latter works that will ever continue to be most valued. The peculiar passion of Aristotle, was that of classifying, arranging, and combining the objects of his knowledge, so as to reduce all to a few principles; a dangerous propensity in philosophy, and repressive of improvement in science.

11. The Sceptical sect was founded by Pyrrho, [a native of Elea, 336 B.C.] They formed no system of their own, but endeavoured to weaken the foundations of those of all others. They inculcated universal doubt as the only true wisdom. There was, in their opinion, no essential difference between vice and virtue, farther than as human compact had discriminated them. Tranquillity of mind they supposed to be the state of the greatest happiness, and this was to be attained by absolute indifference to all dogmas or opinions.

12. The Stoics, proposing to themselves the same end, tranquillity of mind, took a nobler path to arrive at it. They endeavoured to raise themselves above all the passions and feelings of humanity. They believed all nature, and God himself, the soul of the universe, to be regulated by fixed and immutable laws. The human soul, being a portion of the Divinity, man cannot complain of being actuated by that necessity which actuates the Divinity himself. His pains and his pleasures are determined by the same laws which determine his existence. Virtue consists in accommodating the disposition of the mind to the immutable laws of nature; vice in opposing those laws: vice therefore is folly, and virtue the only true wisdom. A beautiful picture of the Stoical philosophy is found in the Enchiridion of Epictétus, and in the Meditations of M. Aurelius Antoninus. [Zeno, a native of Cyprus and disciple of Crates the Cynic, was the founder of this sect].

13. Epicúrus taught that man's supreme happiness con sisted in pleasure. He himself limited the term so as to make it mean only the practice of virtue. But if pleasure is allowed to be the object, every man will draw it from those sources which he finds can best supply it. It might have been the pleasure of Epicurus to be chaste and tem

perate; we are told it was so. But others find their pleasure in intemperance and luxury; and such was the taste of his principal followers. Epicurus held that the Deity was indifferent to all the actions of man; they therefore had no other counsellor than their own conscience, and no other guide than the instinctive desire of their own happiness.

14. The Greek philosophy, on the whole, affords little else than a picture of the imbecility and caprice of the human mind. Its teachers, instead of experiment and observation, satisfied themselves with constructing theories; and these, wanting fact for their basis, have only served to perplex the understanding, and retard equally the advancement of sound morality and the progress of useful knowledge.

XXIV.-The History of Rome.

1. In the delineation of ancient history, Rome, after the conquest of Greece, becomes the leading object of attention; and the history of this empire, in its progress to universal dominion, and afterwards in its decline and fall, involves a collateral account of all the other nations of antiquity which, in those periods, are deserving of our consideration.

2. Although we cannot conjecture with certainty as to the era when Italy was first peopled, we have every reason to believe that it was inhabited by a refined and cultivated nation many ages before the Roman name was known. These were the Etruscans, of whom there exist at this day monuments in the fine arts which prove them to have been a splendid, luxurious, and highly polished people. Their alphabet, resembling the Phoenician, disposes us to believe them of eastern origin. The Roman historians mention them as a powerful and opulent nation, long before the origin of Rome, "The power of the Tuscans extended far and wide by sea and land before the Roman sway" (lib. v. 33); and Dionysius of Halicarnassus deduces most of the religious rites of the Romans from Etruria.

3. The rest of Italy was divided among a number of independent tribes or nations, comparatively in a rude and uncultivated state; Umbrians, Ligurians, Sabines, Veientes, Latins, Equi, Volsci, &c. Latium, a territory of fifty miles in length and sixteen in breadth, contained fortyseven independent cities or states.