ABSTRACT
The spiritual movement that changed the character of ancient autobiography will now become our more immediate concern. Our attention will be focused on the relations of the idea of personality to the ultimate problems of life as revealed in the philosophic meditation, the criticism of society, and the religious impulses that found their way into literature. No autobiographies in the proper sense of the word are available here—if we had a continuous sequence of them, how much clearer a view could we gain of the complicated development of moral and religious life at the outset of the Christian era! For that development does indeed form the living background of the political forms of organization both in the Hellenistic states and in the Roman empire, even though in the latter its forces were temporarily prevented from attaining full growth by the Augustan Restoration.
