varied results; the results among Aristotelians differ from those among Epicureans, Stoics or Platonists. For example, the Epicureans saw the imitation of the blissful life of the gods, who in their view had no direct influence on the nature of this world, as ‘knowledge of the gods’. From the Hellenistic period onwards, the notion begins to spread in Greece that knowledge is not only the consequence of a committed activity of the human mind, or, more precisely, of the reason which indwells the world,