In those peregrinations I came across this from Guthrie's History of Greek Philosophy (Cambridge, 1965). It is just too beautiful to waste. Consider it in the context of Apres L'empire, entre la nuit.
``...If the gradual loss of a sense of community, the decreasing opportunity to play a decisive part in public life, meant more freedom for the intellectual to indulge in the secluded pursuits of study and research, it also induced a widespread feeling of uneasiness, loss of direction, homelessness. In earlier, more compact polities the individual was first and foremost a citizen, with comprehensive rights and duties and a niche of his own in society. The largest community known to him was one in which he himself was widely known. All other communities were foreign, to be encountered only in the course of diplomacy or war. His world, like Aristotle's universe, was organically deposed. It had a centre and a circumference. As the Hellenistic age advanced, he became more like a Democritean atom, aimlessly adrift in an infinite void. Under this sense of strangeness, the common accidents of poverty, exile, slavery, loneliness and death took on more frightening shapes and were brooded over more anxiously. One result of this, especially in the later Hellenistic period, was an increase in the popularity of mystery-religions, both Greek and foreign, which in one form or another promised `salvation'. Cults of this sort, from Egypt and Asiatic countries, not unknown to Greeks before, gained adherents from all ranks of society. Philosophy also was naturally not unaffected. New systems arose to meet the new needs, systems whose declared goal was the attainment of ataraxia, undisturbed calm, or autarkeia, self-sufficiency.
The philosophies which dominated the scene from the end of the fourth century onwards were Epicureanism and Stoicism. The latter in particular attained such widespread influence that it might almost be called the representative philosophy of the Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman ages. Both harked back for their inspiration to the thinkers of the great creative period which ended with Aristotle. They were not on this account lacking in originality, to which Stoicism in particular has strong claims. Indeed, to say at what point a philosophic system ceases to be a synthesis of earlier thought and becomes an original creation is by no means easy. Few would deny originality to Plato, yet his philosophy could be plausibly represented as arising simply from reflection on the utterances of Socrates, the Pythagoreans, Heraclitus and Parmenides. What distinguishes the Hellenistic systems is rather, as I have indicated, a difference of motive. Philosophy no longer springs, as Plato and Aristotle rightly said that it did in the first place, from a sense of wonder. Its function is to bring an assurance of peace, security and self-sufficiency to the individual soul in an apparently hostile or indifferent world....
Epicurus, who was in his late teens when Aristotle and Alexander died, singled out religion as the root of spiritual malaise. The greatest single cause of mental distress lay in fear of the gods and of what might happen after death. It was an outrage that men should be tormented by the notion that our race was at the mercy of a set of capricious and man-lke deities such as Greece had inherited from Homer, gods whose malice could continue to pursue its victims even beyond the grave. The atomic theory of Democritus, which accounted for the origin of the Universe and for all that happens therein without the postulate of divine agency, seemed to him at the same time to express the truth and to liberate the mind of man from its most haunting fears. Undoubtedly the gods exist, but if, as true piety demands, we believe them to lead a life of calm and untroubled bliss, we cannot suppose them to concern themselves with human or mundane affairs. At death the soul (a combination of especially fine atoms) is dispersed. To fear death is therefore foolish, since so long as we live it is not present, and when it comes we no longer exist and are therefore unconscious that it has come...'' (17-18p, Gutherie)
CG