While therefore it must be acknowledged that the stoical conception of the whole earth as one city(469) was a true result of Greek thought, and at the same time the highest point it reached, and a positive result of great value, yet it must also be said that it was one rather big with rich promises for the future than of any great present advantage: for it required to be impregnated and filled with another conception of which its framers had lost their hold, the doctrine, that is, of a future retribution, redressing the inequality, the injustice, the undeserved suffering so often falling upon virtue in the present life. When that conception came to complete and exalt the Stoic idea, the need of self-destruction as an issue of the wise man, as soon as he could not live according to nature, ceased, for man himself ceased to be a part of a physical whole governed by necessity. The human city relaxed its right over the individual in presence of a divine city, which embraced indeed man in his present life, but taught him to look for its complete realisation in another.
The human commonwealth, however, extended in idea to the race itself, as possessing reason in common, and individual man therein, as well as the whole aggregate, viewed as being ruled by the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, but both the commonwealth and the individual terminating with this life, was the last word of heathen philosophy up to the time of Claudius.