actions of ordinary men are quite as important in the history of human civilisation. Zeno founded in the Stoa Poikile of Athens the Stoic philosophy, and Epicurus taught the doctrines which bore his name, at the same time when Aristotle was lecturing in the Lyceum and the successor of Plato in the Academy. Both were largely concerned with the rules for right conduct in life. The Stoics taught that wisdom and virtue are the true goal of man. Virtue consists in living according to Nature, and it becomes the business of the wise man to discover what is essential and distinguish it from what is merely accidental and ephemeral. Pleasure, praise, even life itself, are among things accidental. At its best Stoicism insisted very sternly upon duty, and the contempt of pain and death. In this way it seized upon all that was noblest in the Roman character and raised up under the Empire a series of martyrs who alone withstood the tyrants because they were not afraid of death. It