As far as I know, just as Europeans evolved rational material war, law, government, engineering, geometric mathematics (an important distinction), and religion was more an act of loyalty, exchanges (sacrifices), and not of submission, and religion was far more ‘civic’ (social) an festival driven (expensive), philosophy (mindfulness in knowledge and understanding, stoicism (mindfulness of action) and epicureanism (mindfulness in the small joys of life), continue to reflect the realism, naturalism, productivity, achievement and forward-looking, metaphysics of Europeans. (unfortunately “Alexander brought the curse of authoritarian mysticism into European civilization”.) So Europeans had just about developed a region of cognitive behavioral therapy (stoicism) and constructive living within one’s means (epicureanism), to accompany their civic religion of nature, ancestor, archetype, and state-worship (loyalty). All humans require mindfulness (reduction of neural cost of continuous calculation in the face of uncertainty) especially as population sizes expand, the division of labor increases, and anonymity, irrelevance, uncertainty, and insecurity arrive at the cost of wealth (think of today’s ‘lost generations’ here in the west. So all civilizations developed various forms of achieving mindfulness as a consequence. Only europeans developed forward looking (evolutionary) rather than static, cyclical, or regressive metaphysical understandings of the universe, the world, and their place in it.
Unfortunately, Overexpansion, natural problems of communication and administration, the resulting corruption, over-immigration, invasion-war, under-reproduction, increased reliance on mercenaries and those who were not devoted to the roman civilization as a solution to historical problems, were met with plague, and in particular excessive exposure to middle eastern cultures, and created a vulnerability to the false promises of Christianity (cheap, non-performative, imaginary, without responsibility), first through women, then thru slaves, then through the underclasses (just like feminism and postmodernism today), until the power over the underclasses was sufficient that men took over control of the religion from women (like doctors from midwives in the 19th century). The Christians then eventually killed the philosophers, closed the stoic schools, burned the books and writings, destroyed the statues, arts, and temples, (just like BLM/Antifa and the Postmodernists in Education today), and slowly took over administration the way that postmodernists have worked their way into academy, schools, government, and the media today.
So my observation is that the demand for stoicism/epicureanism has returned but we are unable to construct and institutionalize it because we are presently in such a crisis due to immigration in blue cities seeking to repeat the destruction of Rome from within, and the center that is trying to preserve the military, empirical, rational tradition (and unfortunately the Christian as well).
I have done some work on how to achieve that without the religious trappings, by ‘educating the whole person’ including mindfulness (stoicism), a good life and a good person (epicureanism), physical fitness, restoration of adversarialism throughout education, and restoration of grammar, logic, and of course, natural law (ethics), as and rhetoric (speech), and manners and etiquette. For the simple reason that they are costly behaviors that produce not only cognitive mindfulness but interpersonal and social harmony. As such we would have far less political disharmony.
Anyway. Enough for now.
-cheers