The basic foundations of Greek thought can be traced back to the 2nd century B.C.E. when Panaetius attempted to consolidate the schools of Stoicism and Platonism, based on the teachings of Socrates and Plato; also, Posidonius and Antiochus began to vigorously rebuild the Academy and focused primarily on restoring the writings of Aristotle to their proper place in Greek thought and philosophy. With the beginning of the Hellenistic Age, many thinkers began to contemplate the development of the sciences, especially mathematics, astronomy and medicine and then attempted to incorporate these foundational subjects into Greek philosophy. Other thinkers depended upon observation and the collection of facts in order to conceive new ideas related to how human beings live and interact within the natural world around them. Also, scholars made language, literature and history the subjects of much research which inevitably led to secular humanism, being the study of man and his environment outside of the influence of theology and religion. This approach was very unique at the time, due to the fact that the Greeks, led by such brilliant thinkers as Plato, Socrates and Epicurus, considered the world from an objective viewpoint as opposed to subjective which invariably led to great intellectual strides in Western society and gave girth to the Renaissance some 1500 years later.
             The most significant schools of thought to arise during the Hellenistic Age, all of which were based on earlier models, was Epicureanism and Stoicism. The first took its name from Epicurus (341 to 271 B.C.E.) whose "study of philosophy represented a new social form in opposition to previous traditions because he admitted women and slaves as regular members of his group" (Martin, 213). According to Epicurus, all human beings should be free of worry and anxiety related to death and that all human knowledge must be empirical, i.e. derived from
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