With the decline of the Greek world and the rise of the Roman one, movements such as Stoicism and Christianity would come to give expression to an individual point of view, but under the social conditions of Rome or the Middle Ages such a subjective point of view could only be an alienated one attracted to what, in contrast to Greek concreteness, would be seen as abstractions. Prior to the modern world there would be no real place in either everyday life or in philosophical culture for any non-alienated versions of the reflective or subjective position that had first emerged with Socrates—no form of life in which this individual dimension of human subjectivity could be at home. But Christianity marked a type of advance over Stoicism in that its doctrines of the nature of a good life had a this worldly exemplar. Thus in describing the doctrine of the Stoic sage, Hegel seemed fond of quoting Cicero’s dictum that nobody can say who this sage is (LHP II: 250–1, 256). It was the abstractness of the Stoic’s conception of the good man that was answered by the new religious cult centred on the life of the historical Christ.