he could diagnose and cure, he could seldom prevent, inasmuch as he had little understanding of the causes of maladies.  He had everything to learn in regard to sanitation and the preventing of infection.  A plague would sometimes kill half the people in a town or district, and the loss of 30,000 persons in the metropolis would probably appear to most Romans as a visitation of the gods, nor is it certain that the doctors would generally disagree with that view.  Though there were many quacks, it is not the case that the reputable medical men—­most of them Greek, some of them Romans, who borrowed a Greek name because it “paid”—­lacked the scientific spirit or such knowledge as the time afforded.  They went to the medical school at Alexandria or elsewhere, and studied their treatises on physic and anatomy, but, at least in the latter subject, they were sadly hampered.  Dissection of human bodies was forbidden by law as being a desecration of the dead, and though it might sometimes be practised sub rosa, it was the general custom to perform the dissections on other animals, particularly monkeys, and to argue thence erroneously to mankind.

CHAPTER XXI

PHILOSOPHY—­STOICS AND EPICUREANS

With such an unsatisfactory equipment of science, and with such a vague and morally inoperative religion, it was no wonder that the higher minds of the contemporary world turned to the study of philosophy.  Of such studies there had been many schools or sects, but at this date we have chiefly to reckon with two—­the Stoics and Epicureans.  There were, it is true, the Academics, who disputed everything, and held no doctrine to be more true than its contrary.  There were Eclectics, who picked and chose.  But the majority of those who affected a positive philosophy attached themselves either to the Stoic or else to the Epicurean system, not necessarily with orthodox rigidity on every point, but as a general guide—­at least in theory—­to the conduct of life.  Where we belong to a certain religious denomination or church, and “sit under” a certain class of preachers, they belonged to a certain school of philosophy, and attended the lectures of certain of its expounders.  Instead of a chaplain or parish clergyman they engaged or associated with an expert in their special system.  But just as the Frenchman remarked, “Je suis catholique, mais je ne pratique pas,” so might one be in principle a good Stoic without much exercise of the accepted doctrines.  The distinction between the tenets of the two great schools was wide, but within each school itself individuals might differ as widely as “Broad Church” from whatever its opposite may be called.  The choice between the two schools was mainly a matter of temperament.  Persons of the sterner type of mind, caring comparatively little for the physical comforts and gracious amenities of life, and possessed of a strong sense of duty and