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Title: The Emperor Marcus Aurelius
A study in ideals
Author: John C. Joy
Release date: March 30, 2026 [eBook #78320]
Language: English
Original publication: St. Louis: B. Herder, 1913
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78320
Credits: Andrés V. Galia and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EMPEROR MARCUS AURELIUS ***
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A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated
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* * * * *
[Illustration: “He spoke to them of the vanity of life.”] _Page 98._
The Emperor Marcus Aurelius
A STUDY IN IDEALS
BY
JOHN C. JOY, S.J.
B. HERDER
17 SOUTH BROADWAY, ST. LOUIS, MO.
CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY OF IRELAND
24 UPPER O’CONNELL STREET, DUBLIN
1913
μητρι
ὑπομνήσεως χάριν
ἀπαρχαί
_Printed by_ BROWNE AND NOLAN, LTD., _Dublin_.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
PRELUDE 1
CHAPTER II
THE BOY STOIC 11
CHAPTER III
A PHILOSOPHER ON THE THRONE 30
CHAPTER IV
LIFE IN THE PALACE 44
CHAPTER V
ON THE DANUBE 55
CHAPTER VI
THE BOOK OF MEDITATIONS 68
CHAPTER VII
LAST DAYS IN ROME 81
CHAPTER VIII
“THE END OF THE OLD WORLD” 95
CHAPTER IX
THE MARTYRS OF CHRIST 106
CHAPTER X
THE PAGAN À KEMPIS 128
_Even in a palace, life may be led well!
So spake the imperial sage, purest of men,
Marcus Aurelius. But the stifling den
Of common life, where, crowded up pell-mell._
_Our freedom for a little bread we sell,
And drudge under some foolish master’s ken
Who rates us if we peer outside our pen--
Matched with a palace, is not this a hell?_
_Even in a palace! On his truth sincere
Who spake these words, no shadow ever came
And when my ill-schooled spirit is aflame._
_Some nobler, ampler stage of life to win,
I’ll stop and say, “There were no succour here,
The aids to noble life are all within.”_
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
The Emperor Marcus Aurelius
CHAPTER I
PRELUDE
“Marcus Aurelius is perhaps the most beautiful figure in history. He
is one of those consoling and hope-inspiring marks which stand for
ever to remind our weak and easily discouraged race how high human
goodness and perseverance have once been carried and may be carried
again. The interest of mankind is peculiarly attracted by examples of
signal goodness in high places; for that testimony to the worth of
goodness is the most striking which is borne by those to whom all the
means of pleasure and self-indulgence lay open, by those who had at
their command the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. Marcus
Aurelius was the ruler of the grandest of Empires and he was one of the
best of men. Besides him history presents one or two other sovereigns
eminent for their goodness, such as Saint Louis and Alfred. But Marcus
Aurelius has for us Moderns this great superiority of interest over
Saint Louis or Alfred, that he lived and acted in a state of society
modern by its essential characteristics, in an epoch akin to our own,
in a brilliant centre of civilisation. Trajan talks of ‘our enlightened
age’ just as glibly as The _Times_ talks of it. Marcus Aurelius thus
becomes for us a man like ourselves, a man in all things tempted as we
are. Saint Louis inhabits an atmosphere of medieval Catholicism which
the man of the nineteenth century may admire, indeed, and passionately
wish to inhabit, but which, strive as he will, he cannot really
inhabit. Alfred belongs to a state of society half barbarous. Neither
Alfred nor Saint Louis can be morally and intellectually as near to us
as Marcus Aurelius.”
These are the words of a writer in the highest degree representative
of modern thought--Matthew Arnold. As such they will serve as a text
for this study, and, I hope, as a justification for including it
amongst the publications of the Catholic Truth Society. They will be a
text since they touch on the points of greatest interest in the life
of Marcus Aurelius; his high natural ideals; his fidelity in great
part to those ideals; the contrast thus presented between him and his
surroundings. This quotation from such a writer will also perhaps
justify the appearance of this study in the good company of the C.T.S.
catalogue, since it proves the interest which this pagan Emperor of
Rome has for the men of our own time, whatever their opinions. For
Christians there is the additional interest afforded by the contrast
between his ideals and those of the martyrs--the ideals of nature and
those of grace. Incidentally, a study of his life and age shows, as Mr.
F. H. Myers well points out, how futile are the neo-pagan theories, so
much in fashion in our own times, of the self-sufficiency of nature;
and also, as Mr. Myers does not point out, how essential for heroic
virtue is the indwelling of the Spirit of God, the supernatural aid of
grace.
The life of Marcus Aurelius has had a fascination for those in all
ages who are interested in the strivings of human nature after the
ideal--and these are, I suppose, most men of culture (_humani_ the
Romans rightly called them). The early Christians took the same
interest in him which they took in all the nobler pagans, in Plato and
in Socrates, in Vergil, Seneca, and Epictetus; they praised his virtue
and found in it a spur to higher things. If unregenerate nature could
do so much, how ought not the regenerate blush for their tepidity?
This was the sentiment also of that Cardinal Barberini who translated
the Meditations which Marcus has left us. He dedicated the translation
to his own soul “in order to make it redder than his purple at the
sight of the virtues of this gentile.” Marcus’ contemporaries of all
shades of opinion--Christians no less than pagans--bore testimony to
the integrity of his life and, on the whole, the wisdom and justice
of his rule. Long after his death his bust might be found amongst
the household gods all over the Empire. In our own age when men are
losing hold of the supernatural and trying to live without it, the high
attainments of a mere pagan are held up for admiration. Dilettanti are
in love with a moral code which brings with it no shocking sanctions; a
generation sick unto death with scepticism seeks peace in an undogmatic
philosophy of life: but it is all oil and no wine; therefore it heals
not.
Yet honour where honour is due; we have no wish to detract from the
greatness of the good Emperor--a greatness which is only realised by
contrast with the surroundings in which he lived.
Rome, when Marcus came to rule over it, was the centre of a vast
Empire and no capital has ever surpassed it in immorality. It had all
the viciousness of Paris without its grace, the gross materialism of
London enhanced by a system of slavery which brutalised master as well
as slave, and all this joined to the superstition of Pekin. It had
not improved, but rather the reverse, since St. Paul saw it delivered
over to a reprobate sense. It was the spoiled child of its Empire. All
Europe except Germany and Russia owned its sway and ministered to its
desires; so did Asia Minor and Syria as far East as the Euphrates; so
too did Egypt and the whole northern part of Africa. The wealth of
all these provinces was borne by fleets of merchantmen to its port of
Ostia; and not of these alone but the wealth also of India and China.
But besides wealth they gave her something which she needed more: they
gave her life. She must long ago have perished of corruption, did not
the fresh pure blood of Britain, Gaul and Spain come throbbing through
the Empire to give health to its diseased heart. Only when the heart
itself became surcharged with corruption and poured its foulness back
into the system did the Empire decay. But this was not yet. More than
two centuries had to pass after the reign of Marcus Aurelius (A.D.
160-181) before the final rot set in: such was the strange vitality of
that Empire, the greatest the world has ever seen.
From time to time the Emperors made desperate efforts to stem the
rising tide of immorality. As practical men they recognised what
Napoleon and even Voltaire recognised, that there could be no morality
for the masses without religion; but they did not realise so clearly
that there could be religion, especially pagan religion, without
morality. This was indeed what came about in the second century,
especially during the reigns of Marcus Aurelius and his predecessor.
There was a great revival in religion but no corresponding improvement
in morals. Nor was this strange. The gods themselves were represented
as grossly immoral beings; religion was merely a business transaction
with them--a _quid pro quo_--and under the code of honour which too
often marks such transactions. Hence, if you safely could, it was quite
the thing to cheat the gods; you took your chance, but the probability
was that you would get the worst of it, since the gods were the more
dexterous sharpers.
Such were the old Græco-Roman gods; but just at this time there was new
and better blood introduced into the Pantheon. The gods of Egypt and
the East--Mithra and Isis--strange mystic deities, began to be in high
honour all over the Empire. In these new cults there was much that was
higher and nobler than the old Roman religion--in every religion, as
St. Augustine says, there is something good and true--but mixed with
this good there was gross immorality officially sanctioned.
It is strange to think of Marcus as a devotee of all these
superstitions; yet such he was. The intellectual and the cultured
usually were sceptical about the tales of the gods; but few of them
forbore paying them the customary homage. They looked on religion as
a political and social duty and went through its functions as such.
Marcus took the ceremonies more seriously than did the usual Roman of
high rank; but even his faith in the old myths wavered. He was content,
however, not to pry into high matters, and adopted the Stoic attitude
towards them. These philosophers interpreted the legends, often by
Procrustean methods, to suit their own doctrine, but in reality thought
their truth or falsehood of little practical importance. For them
the chief thing was to live a life of virtue, relying on one’s own
strength. He who lived such a life they held to be better than the
gods; and in fact many of them did lead admirable lives, as far as we
can judge. Their virtue, if mingled most frequently with an unlovely
and repellant pride, was at all events a relief amidst the universal
corruption of pagan Rome.
When we consider his pagan surroundings we marvel at the virtue of
Marcus Aurelius; but, great as this was, Rome had now something greater
far. There were at this time many silent figures who passed with
downcast eyes and modest mien through her polluted streets; they met
in strange places and celebrated strange rites; they did good to all;
and all about them breathed a purer air, a fragrance of Heaven unknown
before. These were they beside whose God-given strength of soul the
strugglings of the Stoic Emperor were but the feeble gropings of an
infant. Christianity was fast spreading over the Empire. Already the
Catacombs were extending in a maze of net-work beside Rome. All was
ready for the greatest persecution the Church had yet endured; this
time it was to come from the hands of the well-meaning but narrow and
unfortunate Marcus. In Rome itself the Christians were multiplying
fast; converts were made amongst the nobility; long before they had
penetrated even into “Cæsar’s household.” It was about this time that
Tertullian wrote his well-known words: “We are but of yesterday and yet
we fill every place--your cities, your houses, your fortresses, your
_municipia_, councils, camps, tribes, decurias, palace, senate, forum;
we leave you your temples.” And he adds, in words in which we must
allow for rhetorical exaggeration: “Were we to detach ourselves from
you, you would be scared by your solitude and by the silence, which
would be like that of a dead world.”
Though Marcus must have known from the police authorities the great
numbers of the Christians, he understood little of their ideals. It is
the tragedy of his noble life. To quote Arnold again: “What an affinity
for Christianity had this persecutor of the Christians! The effusion
of Christianity, its relieving tears, its happy self-sacrifice, were
the very element one feels for which his spirit longed; they were near
him, he touched them, he passed them by.... What would he have said
to the Sermon on the Mount? ... What would have become of his notions
of the _exitiabilis superstitio_ (the deadly superstition), of ‘the
obstinacy of the Christians’? Vain question! Yet the greatest charm
of Marcus Aurelius is that he makes us ask it. We see him wise, just,
self-governed, tender, thankful, blameless; yet with all this agitated,
stretching out his arms for something beyond, _tendentemque manus ripae
ulterioris amore_.”
Of the details of the external life of Marcus Aurelius we know very
little. It is his internal life which interests us most, and that is
recorded for us by his own hand in his book of Meditations. They are
notes, meant probably for no eyes but his own, of his efforts after
virtue--the record of his soul. That the ruler of the Roman Empire
should have thought such thoughts and, in great part, lived up to them;
that at the same time he, who represented the best that paganism could
produce, should have fallen far short of the heroism shown by Christian
slave-girls; that his life and meditations prove in the concrete how
vast is the gulf between the natural and the supernatural: in these
facts lie the various fascinations which the Emperor Marcus Aurelius
has had for Pagan and Christian, for Atheist and Theist, for the
Positivist, who would fain be rid of the supernatural, and the Mystic
for whom the supernatural is everything.
_The author desires once for all to acknowledge his debt to numerous
writers dealing with the life and period of Marcus Aurelius. It is
hardly necessary to mention the names of Dill, Pater, and Renan._
CHAPTER II
THE BOY STOIC
Annius Verus, known to the world by his adopted name as the Emperor
Marcus Aurelius, was born at Rome in A.D. 121. His father, also Annius
Verus, was descended from a Spanish family which a few generations
before had settled in Rome. Of him we know little; but what we do
know is favourable. Marcus tells us that “from his reputation and
remembrance” he learned “modesty and a manly character.” His mother’s
memory he always recalled with veneration and love. She it was that
taught him “piety and beneficence and abstinence not only from evil
deeds but even from evil thoughts; and, further, simplicity in my way
of living far removed from the habits of the rich.”
When Marcus was born the reigning Emperor was Hadrian. Hadrian was
himself a Spaniard and inclined to favour those of Spanish descent.
Thus the family of Annius Verus came into prominence; and before Marcus
was yet more than eight years of age the Emperor took a special
interest in him.
The boy even at this early age was not quite as the other children
who passed to and fro in the Imperial palace. All through life his
health was imperfect; yet even as a child he had begun to practise
the Stoic austerities. He slept on a plank bed and was abstemious at
table, and only at his mother’s request did he relax these practices.
His biographer tells us that “he was grave from his first infancy.” In
later years he himself thanked the gods “that he had never been hurried
into any offence against them,” though, with his wonted candour, he
adds, that he “had the disposition, which, if opportunity had offered,
might have led him to do something of the kind; but, through their
favour, there never was such a concurrence of circumstances as put me
to the trial.” The candour of the child was so transparent that Hadrian
used to call him not _Verus_ (true) but _Verissimus_ (exceedingly true).
It was not strange that Hadrian should have been interested in this
grave, pensive, unworldly child. He was a keen observer of human
nature, and regarded with curiosity and a certain reverence a character
so superior to its surroundings and withal the very antithesis of his
own. He himself was a strange mixture of the Greek and the Roman.
Roman in his legislative and administrative ability, he was Greek and
modern in his love of novelty, his eager curiosity, his frivolous
attitude towards life’s greatest problems--the problems of God and the
soul. This last aspect of his character is enshrined for ever in his
dying address to his soul:--
Animula, vagula, blandula,
Hospes comesque corporis,
Quae nunc abibis in loca;
Pallidula, rigida, nudula--
Nec, ut soles, dabis iocos?
which Merivale thus translates,
“Soul of mine, pretty one, flitting one,
Guest and partner of my clay,
Whither wilt thou hie away;
Pallid one, rigid one, naked one--
Never to play again, never to play.”
Candour, simplicity, purity, gravity: these were the old Roman virtues
of the days of Cato; but they were little in fashion in the heyday
of the Empire. However, they were interesting as antiquities; and
Hadrian loved everything old because he was so modern himself: they had
the charm of the _rus in urbe_, of innocence in high life, and were
grateful to one who loved freshness; and so, while he was in Rome,
Hadrian always had the boy near him. Hadrian and Marcus; the agnostic
and the devotee; the lover of life and the boy Stoic; Greek frivolity
and Roman _gravitas_: it is an interesting contrast.
Already Marcus had the ritual instinct which marked him in later life
and at the age of eight Hadrian appointed him chief of the College of
Salii; a boy bishop of boy priests devoted to Mars, the god of War. In
this office, in the early days of March, he led the patrician youth
in their religious dances through the streets and presided at the
Saliarian banquets. He was scrupulously exact in the fulfilment of
these duties. He already knew by heart the antiquated formulas, couched
in barbarous Latin, whose meaning most men had forgotten. In the
complex ceremonies he never needed a prompter; such was his knowledge
of their rubrics. In one of these rites the boys threw chaplets at
the head of a reclining statue of Mars; but Marcus alone succeeded in
crowning the god. It was an omen of the wars which later were to break
in upon his peace.
At the age of eleven Marcus adopted the _pallium_ or cloak of the
Stoics--thus consecrating his life to divine philosophy. Hadrian
knew Greek and loved Greek thoughts and Greek ways; he knew Plato
and Plato’s ideal--the Philosopher-King. Here was an opportunity
of realising the ideal; why not make Marcus Emperor? His fanciful
mind would have a keen delight in speculating on the future of the
Empire under such a rule. After me the deluge; and he resolved to let
posterity have the benefit of the experiment, and lay the blame or
merit of the result not on him but on Plato.
He at first had adopted as his successor Lucius Verus, the handsome and
dissolute father of the equally handsome and dissolute Lucius Verus,
who was afterwards Marcus’ colleague as Emperor. But Lucius died before
Hadrian, and he then chose a worthier successor. This was the best of
Senators--a Roman of Cato’s school but free from the absurdities of
that school--Antoninus Pius.
In making this second choice Hadrian provided for the succession of the
boy Marcus in due time. He ordered Antoninus to adopt as his sons and
successors Marcus and the younger Lucius Verus. Thus began the lifelong
attachment between Antoninus and Marcus--the rulers of the Golden
Age--the most admirably virtuous, though far from being the ablest of
the Roman Emperors.
Beyond these few facts about his early boyhood scarcely anything has
been handed down to us of his doings till his seventeenth year. What
little we do know we owe to the famous first book of his Meditations.
This he wrote one evening in his tent “among the Quadi, at the Granua,”
a tributary of the Danube, during a lull in the war against the
barbarians of the North. The troubles of his reign had made his later
years a martyrdom that sorely tried his Stoic spirit, and on that
evening his mind sought rest in thinking of his childhood and early
youth. The book was written by an invalid amidst strife and hate and
hardship; yet its ever-recurring note is the note of gratitude struck
on the chords of love. He recalls with affection all who had been good
to him--good in the truest sense; for they had moulded his soul to
virtue.
“To the gods,” he says, “I am indebted for having good grandfathers,
good parents, a good sister, good teachers, good associates, good
kinsmen, and friends, nearly everything good.” From the example or
precept of each he learned some special virtue: from his grandfather
Verus “good morals and the government of my temper”; from his director
“to be neither of the green nor of the blue party at the games in the
circus, not a partisan either of the Palmularius or the Scutarius at
the gladiators’ fights; to endure labour and to want little; to work
with my own hands, and not to meddle with other people’s affairs, and
not to be ready to listen to slander.” Luxury, divorce, and slavery by
this time had brought Roman family life to its lowest ebb of morality,
and it is pleasing to find the harder and purer ideals of older times
still honoured in at least some of the nobler households.
Marcus was educated altogether by private teachers in his own home;
he did not attend the public schools--a fact which he recalls with
gratitude; and he had reason to be grateful. These schools had
multiplied under the generous patronage of the Emperors; no expense
was spared in securing for them the best possible teachers; but in
them the theory of virtue was acquired, if acquired at all, at the
cost of its practice. The _pædagogus_ or slave who accompanied each
boy to and from school usually taught him a more insinuating and
acceptable code of morality than the Stoic asceticism taught at times
in the schools; though some even of the teachers seem to have vied
with the slaves in the inculcation of immorality; hence these schools
were hot-beds of vice and in ill-repute amongst parents who had a care
for their children’s virtue. It is scarcely possible that the keen
edge of Marcus’ moral nature should not have been blunted in such
surroundings; even his passion for perfection could scarcely have
kept him unscathed. As it was, he had the best teachers that could be
procured, mostly belonging to the Stoic School, and in the first book
of the Meditations he traces his development under their direction:--
“From Diognetus I learned not to busy myself about trifling things,
and not to give credit to what was said by miracle-workers and
jugglers about incantations and the driving away of demons and such
things”--perhaps an allusion to the Christians--“and to have desired
a plank bed and whatever else of this kind belongs to the Grecian
discipline.” Rusticus, a famous Stoic philosopher--the same who
afterwards as Prefect of Rome condemned St. Justin to death,--taught
him to avoid sophistry, rhetoric, poetry, and fine-writing, then much
in fashion; “not to walk about the house in my outdoor dress, nor to
do other things of that kind”; to shun vindictiveness; to read deeply,
not superficially; and, greatest benefit of all, he made him acquainted
with the discourses of Epictetus. These discourses henceforth became
his à Kempis and suggested the writing of his own Meditations.
Apollonius--the most rigid of Stoics--impressed on him the great Stoic
virtue “to look at nothing else, not even for a moment, except to
reason; and to be always the same, in sharp pains, on the occasion of
the loss of a child and in long illness.” This last sentence is full
of suppressed pathos in view of his long life of ill-health and the
early death of most of his children. He seems to struggle against the
sense of the tears of things and the mortal woes that touch even the
Stoic heart; but he is conscious that here at least he is too much a
man to be a sage; for in his letters to Fronto we see the most tender
solicitude for his delicate children, a mother’s anxiety as to every
sign of their declining or returning health.
As Diognetus had taught him austerity; Rusticus, sincerity; Apollonius,
self-suppression; so it was a grandson of Plutarch’s, Sextus of
Chaeronea, who taught him affection. From Alexander the grammarian,
Fronto his tutor and intimate friend, and Alexander the Platonic he
learned other graces of thought and manner out of which was woven that
inexplicable thing, the character of the perfect gentleman, Nature’s
saint. Catulus, though a Stoic, urged him “to love his children truly”;
Severus, “to love my kin, to love truth and to love justice”; to know
and honour the Stoic heroes and martyrs, Thrasea, Helvidius, Cato,
Dion, Brutus; to have as his ideal “a polity administered with equal
rights and equal freedom of speech, and a kingly government, which
respects most of all the freedom of the governed.” But of all his
teachers none can have had so beneficial an effect on his too rigid
nature as Maximus. His character is that of the natural man at his best.
With Maximus he closes the list of his teachers. His minute observation
of their characteristics, remembered through a troubled life,
paralleled only by the minuteness of his self-analysis, testifies to
his intense desire for virtue. So intense indeed was this desire that
it became a moral disease which to some extent paralysed his power for
action. But, despite its excess, we must pay homage to this thirst of
the soul, this torture of the spirit, those
“High instincts, before which our mortal nature
Did tremble, like a guilty thing surprised.”
Fully to slake that thirst, to alleviate that torture, Marcus should
have shared the love-feasts of the Christians, the morning sacrifices,
the homilies and the ceremonies of the Catacombs. But he knew not the
sublime secrets, the treasure, hidden beneath the earth he daily trod.
Hadrian died in A.D. 138, when Marcus was seventeen years of age.
Antoninus Verus, better known as Antoninus Pius, succeeded as Emperor,
betrothed Marcus to his beautiful daughter Faustina, and had them both
to live with him during the rest of his life in the Imperial household.
Henceforth Marcus and Antoninus were bound by the closest ties of
friendship. Marcus revered Antoninus with an almost superstitious
reverence. Antoninus’ word was law for him, and afterwards in the
rule of the Empire he sought to avoid the least deviation from his
predecessor’s rule of action. In this he was wise, if we are to judge
by the picture he himself has left us of Antoninus. He says:--“In him
I observed mildness of temper, constancy and contempt of honours;
a love of labour and readiness to listen to the advice of others;
strict justice; a knowledge of the time for vigorous action and
for remissness. He considered himself no more than a citizen. His
disposition was to keep his friends, and not to be soon tired of them,
nor yet to be extravagant in his affection; to be contented, cheerful
and provident; to shun flattery and display; to be watchful over the
affairs of the Empire and to be economic in expenditure. In regard
to the gods, he avoided superstition; as to philosophy, he was not
a sophist or a pedant, but honoured true philosophers; not however
reproaching pretended philosophers nor yet being their dupe. In society
he was easy and agreeable and free from all petty jealousy. After his
paroxysms of headaches he came immediately fresh and vigorous to his
usual occupations. His secrets were not many but very few and very
rare, and these only about public matters. He was a man who looked
to what ought to be done, not to the reputation which is got by a
man’s acts. That saying might be applied to him which is recorded of
Socrates, that he was able both to abstain from and to enjoy those
things which many are too weak to abstain from and cannot enjoy without
excess. To be strong both to bear the one and to be sober in the other
is the mark of a man who has a perfect and invincible soul, such as he
showed in the illness of Maximus.”
In many respects the character of Antoninus was more admirable than
that of his successor, whose glory has eclipsed his. He was an abler
ruler because he was not so good a Stoic. He had more of human sympathy
and a more varied interest in life because he was not so much engrossed
in the study of his own soul. He was simple, kind, and genial, whereas
Marcus was cold, reserved, self-conscious. As Renan says: “Antoninus
was a philosopher without boasting of it, almost without knowing
it. Marcus Aurelius was a philosopher of admirable temperament and
sincerity, but he was a philosopher by reflection.” Of the two, the
more attractive is the philosopher by nature, who knows not that he is
so. The philosopher by reflection is always a difficult person and on
occasion may be terrible. Had Antoninus written a book of Meditations
they would probably have shown a less thorough analysis of the human
soul in all its varying moods, a less gnawing desire for perfection,
but they would present a character more pleasing to and imitable by
those whose ways are the ways of men and not of the abstraction of a
man--which is what the Stoic “wise man” would be.
Antoninus loved all the innocent pleasures of life. But most of all
he loved the joys of rural life--the joys of sea and air and wood and
blue Italian sky, the ardour of the chase and the mirth of the harvest
home. He lived most of his life in this simple way at his villa at
Lorium with his own household and Marcus Aurelius. The letters of
Marcus to his tutor Fronto give us a vivid picture of this life. When
the correspondence begins, Marcus was about eighteen years of age. He
writes during the vintage season:--
“MY DEAREST MASTER,--I am well. To-day I studied from three till
eight in the morning after taking food. I then put on my slippers,
and from eight till nine had a most enjoyable walk up and down before
my chamber. Then, booted and cloaked--for so we were commanded to
appear--I went to wait upon my lord the Emperor. We went a-hunting,
did doughty deeds, heard a rumour that boars had been caught, but
there was nothing to be seen. However, we climbed a pretty steep hill
and in the afternoon returned home. I went straight to my books. Off
with my boots, down with my cloak! I spent a couple of hours in bed.
I read Cato’s speech on the property of Pulchra and another in which
he impeaches a tribune. Ho, ho! I hear you cry to your man, off with
you as fast as you can and bring me those speeches from the library of
Apollo. No use to send; I have these books with me too. You must get
round the Tiberian librarian; you will have to spend something on the
matter; and when I return to town I shall expect to go shares with him.
Well, after reading those speeches, I wrote a wretched trifle destined
for drowning or burning. No, indeed, my attempt at writing did not come
off at all to-day; the composition of a hunter or a vintager whose
shouts are echoing through my chamber, hateful and wearisome as the
law-courts. What have I said? Yes, it was rightly said, for my master
is an orator. I think I have caught a cold, whether from walking in
slippers or from writing badly, I do not know. I am always annoyed with
phlegm, but to-day more than usual. Well, I will pour oil on my head
and go off to sleep. I don’t mean to put one drop in my lamp to-day, so
weary am I from riding and sneezing. Farewell, dearest and most beloved
master, whom I miss, I may say, more than Rome itself.”
I shall have so much to say of the virtue of Marcus Aurelius, and it is
such a rare thing to get a saint or an emperor off his guard, putting
on his slippers, grumbling at the noise outside his windows or catching
a cold and sneezing--though I am sure they do those things--that I
cannot refrain from quoting another letter; it tells us more about this
cold, and is the only place in literature, as far as I know, where it
is recorded that a philosopher, a saint, or an emperor took a bath and
snored. He writes to Fronto:--
“MY BELOVED MASTER,--I am well. I slept a little more than usual on
account of my slight cold, which seems to be well again. So I spent
my time from five till nine in the morning partly in reading Cato’s
agriculture, partly in writing, not quite so badly as yesterday
indeed. Then after waiting upon my father I soothed my throat with
honey-water, ejecting it without swallowing. Then I attended my father
as he offered sacrifice. Then to breakfast. What do you think I ate?
Only a little bread, though I saw others devouring beans, onions, and
sardines! Then we went out to the vintage and got hot and merry, but
left a few grapes still hanging, as the old poet says, ‘atop on the
topmost bough.’ At noon we got home again; I worked a little but it
was not much good. Then I chatted a long time with my mother as she
sat on her bed. My conversation consisted of, ‘What do you suppose my
Fronto is doing at this moment?’ to which she answered, ‘and my Gratia,
what is she doing?’ and then I, ‘and our little darling, the younger
Gratia?’ And while we were talking and quarrelling as to which of us
loved all of you best, the gong sounded, which meant that father had
gone across to the bath. So we bathed, and dined in the oilpress room.
I don’t mean that we bathed in the press room; but we bathed and then
dined and amused ourselves with listening to the peasants’ banter. And
now that I am in my own room again, before I roll over and snore, I am
fulfilling my promise and giving an account of my day to my dear tutor;
and if I could love him better than I do, I would consent to miss
him even more than I miss him now. Take care of yourself, my best and
dearest Fronto, wherever you are. The fact is that I love you, and you
are far away.”
So far we have seen only the edifying--almost priggish--side of Marcus’
character. The monotony of his perfection is relieved by the following
incident, which shows that at this time he had just enough mischief in
him--though it be but little--to make him amiable. He writes:--“When my
father returned home from the vineyards, I mounted my horse as usual,
and rode on ahead some little way. On the road was a herd of sheep,
standing crowded together as though the place were a desert, with four
dogs and two shepherds but nothing else. Then one shepherd said to
another on seeing the horsemen: ‘I say, look at these horsemen; they
do a deal of robbery.’ On hearing this, I clap spurs to my horse and
ride straight for the sheep. They scatter in consternation--hither and
thither they are fleeting and bleating. A shepherd throws his fork and
the fork falls on the horseman who came next to me. We make our escape.”
Thus the days went happily at Lorium in the companionship of Pius,
itself “a school of all the virtues.” For twenty-three years
Marcus studied in this school, but like all good things this sweet
discipleship too had an end. In A.D. 161 Antoninus died a death as
peaceful as his life had been. Feeling the end nigh he put his affairs
in order and commanded that the golden statue of Fortune, the symbol
of Empire, which had ever to stand in the Emperor’s state apartments,
should be borne to Marcus’ chamber. To the tribune on duty he gave
the password _Æquanimitas_ (peace of soul) as the watchword of the
night,--the night of his own soul; then turning about, he seemed to
fall asleep: his own peaceful spirit had passed away; “κατ’ἰσὸν ὑπνῷ
μαλακωτάτῳ as if in gentlest sleep.”
The sceptre passed into the hands of Marcus, then forty years of age.
For him it was the beginning of sorrows. Æschylus would have said that
the gods were jealous of his too great prosperity. In his private
life they were good to him on account of his virtues, but it were
unmeet that with such virtues mortal man should join the sovereignty
of the world; for such a one might justly claim more homage than
the questionable individuals who inhabited Olympus with the title
of “gods.” The lot of men also had been too happy in the Golden
Age of the Antonines: it would exceed all measure were Marcus, the
ideal philosopher-king, to rule with such favour from above as his
predecessors had enjoyed. So might Æschylus have prophesied truly after
the event, as is the way with moralists. Thenceforth the glory of that
age waned. To the philosopher by nature had succeeded the philosopher
by reflection. We shall see the result of the change.
CHAPTER III
A PHILOSOPHER ON THE THRONE
Plato had said that the world would never enjoy happiness until
a philosopher should become king or until a king should become
a philosopher. With the accession of Marcus the rule of the
philosopher-king was an accomplished fact; according, to Gibbon, “the
happiness of the subject was the one object of government,” and all
the good effects anticipated by Plato were brought about. “If a man
were called on,” says he, “to fix the period in the history of the
world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and
prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from
the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus” (thus including
the reigns of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius).
But later historians have reversed this verdict on the Golden Age.
They have shown that the reign of Marcus Aurelius was one of singular
disasters to the State. And indeed Marcus himself had no such faith
in the magical power of philosophy on the throne; he did not believe
in the possibility of realising the Ideal State. “Do not,” he says,
“expect Plato’s Republic: but be content if the smallest thing goes
on well, and consider such an event to be no small matter. For who
can change men’s principles? and without a change of principles what
else is there than the slavery of men who groan while they pretend to
obey? Simple and modest is the work of philosophy. Draw me not aside to
insolence and pride.”
But if Marcus despaired of establishing the reign of Philosophy as the
Queen of Men, he, at any rate, secured the rule of the Philosophers.
Already under Antoninus they had been in high honour; but under Marcus
they filled all the great offices of State. Sophists and rhetoricians
were elevated to the senate, and became consuls and proconsuls merely
because they preached renunciation and had been Marcus’ tutors. He
placed their images amongst his household gods and their statues in
the forum and the senate-house. They were rulers in the provinces,
judges in the law-courts, leaders in the senate. And on the whole they
acquitted themselves well; though amongst their number there were not
a few impostors, long beards, asceticism and rough cloaks became the
fashion and profitable. “His beard is worth ten thousand sesterces to
him,” was the remark passed on one of them; “come, we shall have to pay
goats a salary next!” Marcus distinguished between “true philosophers”
and “pretended philosophers,” and learnt from Antoninus to esteem the
former and to show indulgence to the latter, yet “without permitting
himself to be their dupe.”
When it got to court, Stoicism put away its primitive roughness. “Plain
living and high thinking” became the accepted creed among the brilliant
society of which Faustina was the centre and the exemplar; just as
now in England ritualism and “the Rome-ward movement” become from
time to time the tone amongst elegant blue-stockings of both sexes.
But of course in Rome, as in London, it would have been bad taste to
take seriously what was, with them, at least, merely an interesting
sentiment. Society now turns out to hear the newest preacher on the
newest theology, or the fashionable and good-looking preacher on any
or no theology. So, too, then; Faustina and the Roman ladies came in
all the glory of flowered silk and rare jewels to the Temple of Peace,
there to hear Rusticus or Fronto, or the Emperor Aurelius himself,
lecturing on the vanity of vanities, the shortness of life, the
blessedness of renunciation. Great families had each its philosopher--a
kind of family chaplain; and the great ladies came in their sedan
chairs to consult their philosophical director on the latest freaks of
their fancy.
This interest in philosophy was partly the cause, partly the effect, of
a general movement towards more humane views. The hard pagan world was
beginning to soften; and this humanity was the greatest glory of the
Golden Age. The Stoics preached the brotherhood of man, and sympathy
with men, as men. Hence charity too became part of the Time-Spirit and
showed itself in milder legislation and in beneficent institutions.
The great ones of the world at last took notice of the weak and the
outcast; the stern rule of might and the pitiless destruction of the
“unfit” at last yielded to altruistic sentiments. The slave, the
orphan, and woman were no longer to be the prey of society.
In his legislation in favour of the oppressed Marcus Aurelius did but
carry on the work begun by Antoninus and his excellent council of
jurists. Their first care was to make easier the lot of the slave.
Seneca had said: “All men, if you only go back to their beginnings,
have the gods for their fathers”; and Epictetus: “The slave like you
is the son of Zeus”; and it was in this spirit of reverence for his
fellow-man as his brother and his equal that Marcus sought to confer
on him, in addition to a theoretical fraternity and equality, the third
of the trinity--freedom. The master was no longer allowed absolute
power of life and death over his slaves; the slave was recognised as
having rights; and enfranchisement was encouraged. As the condition of
the slave, so too that of women and orphans was improved. The inhuman
position of woman under old Roman law, by which she was practically
excluded from recognition as a member of the family, was altered by
laws conferring on her rights of property; while orphans were provided
for by numerous charitable institutions.
The first of these institutions endowed by public funds had been
founded by the Emperors Nerva and Trajan. They were multiplied and
developed by Antoninus and still further by Marcus. On the death of
the elder Faustina, Antoninus had founded an institution for orphan
girls--called the _puellae Faustinianæ_ (the little maidens of
Faustina); and on the death of the younger Faustina, Marcus, faithful
in this as in all else to the example of Antoninus, founded a similar
orphanage. These charitable works and many others he was enabled to
carry out by the large fortune, amounting to twenty-two million pounds,
which Antoninus had bequeathed to him.
Yet all his financial policy was not so wise. His good nature and
easy-going attitude towards money matters may have been good Stoicism,
but it was bad statesmanship. On his accession he gave each of the
soldiers of the Praetorian guard a largess of £160 and to the other
soldiers a proportional sum. He frequently distributed free corn to the
mob, and, towards the end of his reign, remitted large debts due to
the Treasury; and ordered that in all cases of prosecution on behalf
of the treasury, the benefit of the doubt was to be given in favour of
the defendant. This was all very well while Antoninus’ legacy lasted;
but the season of leanness soon came, and war and the plague left the
public finances in so desperate a condition that he had to sell his own
personal property and debase the coinage.
The result of this generosity had been to make him the idol of the
unthinking mob, though we have every reason to believe that this
popularity was not sought for. Of the wise man he says: “As to what
any man shall say or think about him or do against him, he never even
thinks of it, being himself contented with these two things: with
acting justly in what he now does, and being satisfied with what is now
assigned to him; and he lays aside all distracting and busy pursuits,
and desires nothing else than the straight course through the law,
and, by accomplishing the straight course, to follow God.” He showed
his indifference to the praise of the groundlings in a practical way
in his legislation as regards the games. He put restrictions on the
gladiatorial contests, and limited the rates of allowance to the stage
performers.
In the eyes of the Roman people the magnificence of the games and
public shows was the one test of munificence. Hence it was something
to have checked those degrading spectacles, but here, as afterwards in
his persecution of the martyrs, he yielded complaisance to conventional
views. He lacked the strength of will to enforce his own ideals; and
perhaps it was as well that he recognised his deficiency and did not
attempt what was, for one of his calibre, the impossible. On great
occasions, to please his colleague Lucius or his wife Faustina, or
in deference to the popular wishes, he used to attend these shows in
state. But when he was present there was to be no shedding of human
blood, at any rate by a fellow-man, though he seems to have allowed the
fights with the beasts. Dion Cassius records this fact: “The Emperor
Marcus was so far from taking delight in spectacles of bloodshed,
that even the gladiators in Rome could not obtain his inspection of
their contests, unless, like the wrestlers, they contended without
imminent risk; for he never allowed the use of sharpened weapons, but
universally they fought before him with weapons blunted.”
He himself, even when presiding, took little interest in the contests.
He spent his time in reading or writing or transacting official
business, giving audiences or signing State papers, much to the disgust
of the populace. They hated such superior refinement and would have
preferred a sportsman to a philosopher as their ruler. They looked on
the Emperor as a milksop, not altogether without reason, though the
right reason was not their reason. He showed his contempt for their
opinions on one occasion in a most emphatic manner. A lion, trained by
a slave to devour human beings, acquitted himself so well in one of
these spectacles in the Emperor’s presence that the whole amphitheatre
rang with applause, and on every side a shout was raised that a slave
who had served the people’s pleasures so well, deserved freedom. The
Emperor, angered at the brutality which he could not prevent, had
averted his eyes, and now replied, “The man has done nothing worthy of
liberty.” Another anecdote shows his care for even the most outcast
of his subjects--those whom the ordinary Roman valued and heeded less
than the beasts of burden. He was present one day at an exhibition
of rope-dancing, when suddenly one of the performers--a boy--missed
his footing, fell into the arena and was hurt. Thereupon the Emperor
ordered that nets and mattresses should always be spread beneath the
rope-walkers.
Despite these attempts--feeble they seem and few--at amelioration and
at instilling a higher view of human nature, the amphitheatre still
remained “the great slaughter-house.” When we look at Marcus’ statue
high in the Pantheon of the Positivists, we must remember another
figure, cold and abstracted indeed, but thus all the more convicted
of feebleness, under the awning and the perfume sprays and flowers
of the Roman amphitheatre looking on with impassive tolerance at the
spectacle of human and animal suffering, the daily bread of the most
brutal of all populaces. True, he could soothe his soul by a Stoic
aphorism on the nothingness of pain, or some other such mockery of
human misery--the necessary refuge of those who had no certainty of a
larger hope. For mockery truly must any solution of the problem of evil
be, and vain comfort, which was not written on Calvary. That Marcus
could look on such suffering unmoved; that he could order it for his
fellow-man when the turn of the Christians came; this removes him from
what Christians look for in their leaders to the land of Promise. It
mattered little that he did not take the delight and interest which
Faustina, seated by strange irony among the Vestal Virgins, robed in
all the magnificence which the Via Nova could produce, took in her
favourite gladiators; or which Commodus, the centre of the fastest
group of young Roman nobles, manifested at every thrust, eager for the
day when he himself could enter the arena as Emperor and fight with the
beasts. The mere fact that he could countenance such brutality condemns
him to the level of conventional mediocrity.
As Pater says: “Those cruel amusements were, certainly, the sin of
blindness, of deadness and stupidity.... Yes! what was needed was the
heart that would make it impossible to witness all this; and the future
would be with the forces that could beget a heart like that.... Surely
evil was a real thing, and the wise man wanting in the sense of it,
where not to have been, by instinctive election, on the right side was
to have failed in life.”
The humanity of the age, though unable to effect any appreciable
reform of the amphitheatre, did much for the relief of the sick. The
great plague brought back from the East by Lucius Verus and his troops
was ravaging the Empire. It has been compared to the great plague of
Athens, which will live for ever in Thucydides’ vivid phrases, and
to the Black Death of the 14th century. Niebuhr says that it was a
disaster from which the old world never recovered. Asia Minor, Greece,
Italy, and Gaul were darkened by its passing; and in Rome itself, so
Dio, a Roman senator, tells us, two thousand men were buried every
day. A Golden Age! An age of peace and happiness indeed! Rather an age
whose glory is that it was an age of hospitals, of funeral clubs and
orphanages; of relief of suffering rather than freedom therefrom.
The temples of Æsculapius, the god of healing, had long been used as
a kind of hospital for the sick, but never before to such an extent
as in the Antonine age. The priests of this god were initiated into
a secret medical lore. His temples could vie with the great medieval
monasteries in the scenic beauty and salubrity of their surroundings.
The excellence of the climate, the traditional lore, the healthy diet
and more healthy abstinence, the careful nursing and the freshness
and brightness of the surroundings, were really efficacious remedies.
Thus, those who laboured under any illness came far and near to the
most famous shrines, such as that of Epidaurus, whose ruins still
remain as a silent witness of its whilom greatness. Their hope was
that they would be favoured with a dream or vision from the kindly
god as to the remedy for their disease. The career of Aristeides,
wandering for thirteen years with fanatical enthusiasm from shrine to
shrine till finally he was cured, shows to what extremes superstition
carried some of those devotees. On one occasion while suffering from a
fever, he thought he had a vision of the god bidding him bathe in the
ice-cold water, and then run a mile, and he carried out this and many
other such assuredly unearthly remedies despite the dissuasions of the
priests. These priests, the _neocoroi_, used to interpret the dream,
and the prescriptions were carried out by medical men and attendants.
The belief in the efficacy of these dream-sent prescriptions was not
confined to the vulgar. Marcus Aurelius believed that he himself had
been cured thus; and his wise physician, Galen, trusted them. Readers
of _Marius, the Epicurean_, will not easily forget Pater’s description
of Marius’ stay in the Temple, nor the words of thanksgiving addressed
to the heaven-sent dreams which he puts on his lips at parting; they
are from the Asclepiadæ of Aristeides: “O ye children of Apollo!
who in time past have stilled the waves of sorrow from many people,
lighting up a lamp of safety before those who travel by sea and land,
be pleased, in your great condescension, though ye be equal in glory
with your elder brethren, the Dioscuri, and your lot in immortal youth
be as theirs, to accept the prayer, which in sleep and vision ye
have inspired. Order it aright, I pray you, according to your loving
kindness to men. Preserve me from sickness, and endue my body with such
a measure of health as may suffice it for the obeying of the spirit,
that I may pass my days unhindered and in quietness.”
Thus charity and culture progressed under the Antonines. So, too,
did industry and trade, which brought with them prosperity and its
attendant luxury until the advent of plague and famine. We are told
that each year the treasures of the East were brought by a fleet of
one hundred and twenty vessels to the ports of the Red Sea, to be
transferred thence through Alexandria to Rome. The silks of China, the
spices and perfumes of India and Arabia, pearls and diamonds, which
were to glitter on the togas of young nobles or round the necks of fair
ladies in the Vicus Tuscus, formed the precious cargo. In return for
these Rome sent annually three-quarters of a million pounds--worth
several times that amount now. “The coast of Malabar and the island of
Ceylon grew rich as trade emporia for the luxuries of Rome and Roman
merchants penetrated the East as consuls of sensuality for the senators
and the ‘friends’ of Cæsar.”
All this led to softening and decadence in the army and in the nation.
With the blessings of peace there came also its vices; the advances in
prosperity and humanity, such as it was, was not accompanied by any
improvement in morals, but perhaps the reverse. The results of Marcus’
reign did not justify Plato’s expectation from the philosopher-king.
What Marcus might have accomplished under less unfavourable
circumstances we cannot surmise; he certainly had not the strength of
mind or body necessary for carrying out far-reaching reforms in such an
Empire. As it was, he was singularly unfortunate in his public life:
war, plague and famine--a trinity which no State could resist--rendered
him powerless. His reign left little outward impress on the Roman
State; his greatest legacy to Rome and to the world was the development
of humane legislation, the reverence for mind above matter, and the
example of a disinterested and noble ruler.
CHAPTER IV
LIFE IN THE PALACE
There is much truth in the saying, “No man is a hero to his valet”--be
his reputed heroism either of the physical or the moral type. Humanity,
even at its best, is an imperfect thing, much in need of the kindly
haze which mostly veils its withered ruggedness; and many an angel of
sweetness and light reveals the serpent’s tail on too close inspection;
but I have no such revelation to offer in this chapter. Indeed, it is
in his intimate domestic life that Marcus appears to best advantage.
His presence in the palace brought with it a sense of restfulness, of
serenity and calm, of mutual forbearance and love. It was as if some
pale glimmer of the Christian love-light played about him and diffused
itself over all that came within the charmed round. His household
was known as the _Sacra Domus_--“the sacred house.” Thus the _Pax
Romana_--the peace that was the gift of the Antonines--though lost to
the Empire, was never interrupted in the Emperor’s home; and to Marcus
is due the credit.
All through life it was his lot to consort with persons having sadly
different views from his own on the meaning of existence, the value
of virtue; yet he was kind and sociable with all. In this he did but
follow the example of the gods: “They are not vexed because, during so
long a time, they must tolerate men, such as they are, and so many of
them bad; and besides this they also take care of them in all ways. But
thou, who art destined to end so soon, art thou wearied of enduring
the bad, and this, too, when thou art one of them?” This tolerance
towards the failings of others had its source in his peculiar gospel of
resignation:--or should we say, fatalism? “That is good for each thing
which the universal nature brings to each. And it is for its good at
the time when nature brings it. ‘The earth loves the shower,’ and ‘the
solemn æther loves,’ and the Universe loves to make whatever is about
to be. I say then to the Universe: ‘I love as thou lovest.’” In this
spirit he bore the trials of his domestic, as of his public, life; keen
griefs coming from without and from within; and the keenest of all for
one of his affectionate nature were those of his own household.
Apollonius had taught him “to be always the same in sharp pains, and on
the occasion of the loss of a child and in long illness.” He learnt
the theory of indifference to natural affection; but, fortunately,
never the practice. The severe light of Stoicism was softened and
suffused in passing through the medium of his gentle nature; he trusted
the reasons of the heart, more than those of the pure intellect. If
Stoic cosmopolitanism would have him care for men in inverse proportion
to their nearness to him, he must depart from type in this. To his
wife Faustina, to his children, to his tutor Fronto and to Fronto’s
children, especially “little Gratia,” he was genuinely devoted.
The correspondence with Fronto, if too effusive for our taste, yet
shows both in their best light. It is full of tender references to
the “little ones,” their joys and their ailments. Fronto writes to
the Emperor: “I have seen the little ones--the pleasantest sight of
my life; for they are as like yourself as could possibly be. It has
well repaid me for my journey over that slippery road and up those
steep rocks: for I behold you, not simply face to face before me,
but, more generously, whichever way I turned, to my right and to my
left. For the rest, I found them, Heaven be thanked, with healthy
cheeks and lusty voices. One was holding a slice of white bread,
like a king’s son; the other a crust of brown bread, as becomes the
offspring of a philosopher. I pray the gods to have both the sower and
the seed in their keeping, to watch over this field wherein the ears
of corn are so kindly alike. Ah! I heard, too, their pretty voices,
so sweet that in the childish prattle of one and the other I seemed
to be listening--yes! in that chirping of your pretty chickens--to
the limpid and harmonious notes of your own oratory. Take care! You
will find me growing independent having those I could love in your
place;--love, on the surety of my eyes and ears.” The Emperor replies
with equal affection: “I, too, have seen my little ones in your sight
of them: as also I saw yourself in reading your letter. It is that
charming letter which forces me to write thus.” Alas! Apollonius;
what has become of the Stoic ἀπάθεια which you inculcated with such
great pains? The spirit indeed was willing, but the flesh was weak;
and so the good Emperor cared more for the slender breath of life that
kept soul and body together in his little Annius Verus than for all
the sublime mysticity of the Weltseele--the world-soul of the Stoic
creed. All the sadder was the early death of his children, one after
another; one son alone being left to him--Commodus, his successor in
the Empire--assuredly not the fittest to survive. “Better that he had
never been born,” anyone had said, except he who had most right of
all to say it. But for Marcus, whatever was, was right; the gods, if
gods there were, determined all things, and they could do no wrong.
Commodus, bright, handsome, impulsive, wayward, fond of gladiators and
low life, found the teaching of Fronto and his father little to his
taste. He was more at home in the circus and the amphitheatre than
in the lecture-room; with the actors, the archers and the gladiators
and the “smart set,” which Faustina gathered round her, than with the
bearded and hooded sophists and rhetoricians who talked ἐγκράτεια
(self-restraint) and αὐτάρκεια (self-sufficiency) in the palace gardens.
Bitter as must have been his disappointment at his ill-success with
Commodus, there was another which thrust home deeper. Ill-fame had long
been gathering round the name of his wife Faustina--the most beautiful
woman in the Empire. One of her vivacious temperament, more Parisian
than Roman, was assuredly ill-mated with the Stoic Emperor, whose
days were spent in introspection; their union was “the great paradox
of the age.” She knew no law but the law of the senses: while he was
ever guided by the admirable but unamiable call of duty, cold as the
beckoning of a star, not soft and warm as the sunlight of devotion.
No modern belle of the season had more zest in the life of the moment
than she had; whilst he lived always in the shadow of the wings of
Death. “Since it is possible that thou mayest depart from life this
very moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly.” Every act
was to be done “with forethought, as if it were the last of thy life.”
Yet, different as they were, by a whole heaven’s breadth in character,
it is to the credit of both that they loved one another. The rumours
that assailed her name were probably in great part the exaggerations
of prurient gossips, though with sufficient foundation to make them
credible. Whatever their truth, the Emperor did not hearken to them.
Even when they became the property of the stage and he himself was
ridiculed in connexion with them, he paid no heed. In the first book of
the Meditations, written a few years before the death of Faustina, he
thanks the gods that he had such a wife, “so obedient, so affectionate,
so simple.” He, too, must have felt at times that Cæsar’s wife should
be above suspicion, but his kindly nature was ever disposed to take the
most charitable view of things, and he minded little the slanderous
tongues of men.
“Does a man gather figs from thistles, or grapes from thorns?”--this
was the keynote to his philosophy of life--a strange fatalist
philosophy it too often was; but it served to lay the gibbering
spectres that haunted the palace of the Cæsars. After all, Faustina,
associating with sailors and gladiators (even if the worst were true),
and Commodus, already giving free reign to his passions over all the
paths of license, were but acting in accordance with nature, “just as
the fruit trees” or the beasts of the forest. Thus, in the loneliness
of his spirit, would Aurelius reason, with an indulgence to the
shortcomings (or worse) of others, which we must condemn as weakness.
But perhaps it was owing to his tact and consideration that her untamed
restlessness carried her to no greater excesses, and that Pater’s
words are true, “the one thing quite certain about her, besides her
extraordinary beauty, is her sweetness to himself.”
One of his biographers, writing under the Emperor Diocletian, has this
pious reflection on the story: “Such is the force of daily life in a
good ruler, so great the power of his sanctity, gentleness, and piety,
that no breath of slander or invidious suggestion from an acquaintance
can avail to sully his memory. In short, to Antonine, immutable as the
heavens in the tenor of his own life, and in the manifestations of his
own moral temper, and who was not by possibility liable to any impulse
or movement of change, on any alien suggestion, it was not eventually
an injury that he was dishonoured by some of his connexions; on him,
invulnerable in his own character, neither a harlot for his wife, nor
a gladiator for his son, could inflict a wound. Then as now, O sacred
lord Diocletian! he was reputed a god; not as others are reputed but
specially and in a separate sense, and with a privilege to such worship
from all men as is addressed to his memory by yourself, who often
breathe a wish to heaven that you were or could be such in life and
merciful disposition as was Marcus Aurelius.”
We saw that even Marcus’ integrity could not shield his household from
the taint of scandal, ever mingling with the divinity that doth hedge
a king; yet the life of that household was of the simplest kind. The
Emperor’s tastes were mostly domestic--philosophy, the fine arts and
intercourse with the learned world around him. The palace was a museum
of all the curious and choice things of every land gathered together
by Hadrian and preceding Emperors; the precious and luxurious were
strewn all around in Oriental magnificence; but not for long. The
Emperor had learnt from Antoninus to be a king without the trappings;
and in his later life he set an example truly Platonic to all future
monarchs of private detachment for the sake of the public good. At that
time distress became universal; the treasury was exhausted; and yet
money was wanted for the wars in the North. In these circumstances, in
order to avoid all further taxation, Marcus put all the treasures of
his Roman palaces and country villas into the public market. Jewels,
pictures, furniture of rare workmanship; dinner-services of gold and
crystal; murrhine vases; the rich hangings and sumptuous apparel of
the imperial household, including even the wardrobe of silken robes,
interwoven with gold, which had been his wife’s before her death:
all these objects, made sacred by long use in the home of the divine
Cæsars, were put under the hammer and fetched fabulous prices. The
auction lasted two months. The _novi homines_--the Roman equivalent for
our _nouveaux riches_--were as keen as would be a group of Americans
at an auction of the Vatican contents. Thus the historic palace of the
Cæsars was despoiled; but Marcus was content while the neighbouring
library in the temple of Apollo remained intact, with Fronto and
Rusticus to come at morning and evening and walk with him amidst the
shrubberies of the Palatine discoursing on the great Greek schools
of Ionia, of Athens, and of Elea; of Democrites, of Plato, Zeno and
Pythagoras and his favourite Epictetus.
In his home, as in public, he was devoted to the old religious
practices. The _lararium_--or family shrine--contained statues of his
favourite gods, one of his own _Genius_ (or spiritual counterpart) and
those of his favourite philosophers and teachers. Here he would offer
the morning sacrifice with flowers and lights and incense, and beg the
favour of the gods for himself and for the Empire. There he would utter
a prayer for the wayward Commodus and Faustina, and for the courage to
persevere to the end on his own steep path. “Every morning I pray for
Faustina,” he writes; and again: “My mother’s illness leaves me not a
moment’s rest; and now Faustina’s confinement is approaching. Well,
we must trust in the gods.” In all this, how strange the mixture of
truth and falsehood; of crude superstition and a higher light breaking
through; of matter and spirit; perhaps even of nature and grace; for it
is hard not to see the special handiwork of God in these fair works of
the spirit world--who will set limits to His mercy and power? or who
will nicely disentangle the strands of that strange mesh-work, a human
soul? St. Clement of Alexandria and St. Augustine saw in those pagan
heroes those who were to prepare the way of the Lord and make straight
His paths. “Paganism saw at least the road from its hill-top,” said
Augustine. We too may say that they were not far from the Kingdom of
God.
Christo iam tum venienti,
Crede, parata via est.
“Believe me even then the path was made straight for Christ already on
His way.” So sang the Christian Prudentius; and we sing, Amen! Even so,
Lord Jesus.
CHAPTER V
ON THE DANUBE
A prince of peace, Marcus Aurelius was destined by the irony of fate
to live most of his days as a leader of battles. The low rumbling of
war from the provinces mingled discordantly with the acclamations
which proclaimed him Princeps, Rome’s chief citizen and lord. The
disturbances in Britain and on the Rhine were easily quelled; but not
so in Parthia or on the Danube.
Parthia was Rome’s great rival in the old world. More than once had
the captains of that mysterious Eastern kingdom plucked the laurels
from Roman brows; the Roman eagle had brooded in captivity in Parthian
dungeons; and had been released not by steel but by gold. On the
succession of Marcus, King Vologeses, a man with all the spirit and
ambition of his race, determined to secure for himself the neighbouring
kingdom of Armenia. The Romans resisted and their first army was
annihilated. This defeat was quickly followed by another; the Eastern
legions were demoralised, and things looked grave for Rome.
It was at this crisis that Marcus entrusted to his consort, Lucius
Veras, the command in the East: a foolish choice, scarcely less foolish
than the first folly of making him his consort. For Lucius had neither
ability nor morality; he spent his days amidst the pleasant groves,
the flowers and the perfumes and the sensuous society of Antioch. He
committed the campaign to the care of his generals, the chief of them,
Avidius Cassius, a soldier tried and true; whilst he himself frittered
away his hours in soft dalliance amidst the ill-famed groves of Daphne,
which made Antioch the lodestone of voluptuaries from all parts of the
world. Avidius Cassius with Priscus and Martius Veras ended the war
within a few years; and Lucius Verus with a heavy heart turned his face
towards the West, to celebrate a triumph and receive high titles in
Rome for his great achievements. But Rome paid dearly for the conquest;
for with the army came the plague which devastated the capital and
Italy.
In the desolation which surrounded him, the Stoic Emperor recognised
the need for something more inspiring than the maxims of his masters,
Zeno and Chrysippus. The futility of such chamber philosophy and
religion was borne home to him with fearful intensity by the human
misery he saw on every side, the stench of the unburied dead, the
haggard looks and demoniacal cries of the living. He recognised, then,
that a syllogism never soothed an aching heart; that for life’s tragic
moments we need a living, breathing, throbbing, thrilling, religion,
a religion of the whole man. Hence he called on all the gods, old and
new, Roman, Grecian, Eastern and Egyptian, to aid the suffering State.
Every altar reeked with the incense of sacrifice; great nobles marched
in procession bearing the statues of the gods; noble ladies might be
seen, half-naked, standing beneath the platform from which the hot
blood of the slain bull poured down upon them, enduring this baptism of
the Great Mother, by which they were to be “reborn for eternity”; at
eventide a wanderer in the Campus Martius might hear the vesper song
of Isis, and entering her shrine might see dark Egyptians holding up
the water of the Nile for adoration; or, descending into a subterranean
chapel, he might see the slave, the soldier, and the senator, side
by side, attending at the strange mystic initiations of Mithra, the
Unconquered One, the god of light, the strong young god in Phrygian cap
and loose flowing mantle caught by the sculptor in the symbolic slaying
of the bull. No extravagance of superstition, however fantastic, was
omitted, not even the greatest extravagance of all, the cry of “the
Christians to the lions.” If Aurelius had but known; if Rome in its
desolation could have seen; if modern Europe and its rulers could but
realise the secret healing of Christ’s religion of sorrow, how much
the world, laboured and heavy-burdened, would be refreshed! But Marcus
did not know this healing. He prayed and he sacrificed: but the plague
did not pass, nor were his people comforted. The ancient world never
recovered from the blow, Niebuhr says. While it yet raged, another call
to arms came, this time from the Danube.
It was the severest onset of the barbarians which the Roman Empire had
yet endured. All the tribes from the Rhine to the Don, Teutonic and
Slavonic, seemed in league against it. These wild Northmen, chaste and
strong of limb, had hurled themselves on the Danube frontier and broken
into the sacred precincts of the _Pax Romana_. The Danube passed,
Pannonia, Dacia, Greece were overrun. The prints of Northern hoofs were
on the plains of Rhætia and Noricum; and the wild Marcomanni were seen
in the streets of Venice and Padua. Well might the Romans fear that
it would be with them now as it was in the days of Hannibal. Aye, and
even worse; for the Romans of the second century of the Empire were
not the Romans of the second or third century before the fall of the
Republic; and to replace a Scipio and a Marcellus, they had for leader
not a Vespasian or a Trajan, but a sickly “Greekling,” “a philosophical
old woman,” as Avidius Cassius used to call him. This was their Emperor
Aurelius, and in these wars on the Danube he was amply to refute these
taunts of the men of rougher mould. His was the great task of stemming
the first inflow of those nomadic tribes which, two centuries later,
swept in full flood-tide over the Empire; and he performed it well if
not greatly.
The heralds of the revolt found him at his work of peace and
legislation, of charity and self-culture in the capital. Now came
the test of his principles of devotion to duty. Would he face the
loneliness, spiritual and intellectual, the barbarity, the long-drawn
desolation of a campaign in the dull plains of Hungary? Would he be a
leader to his people? or would he, like certain selfish souls, wrap
himself in himself and seek his own advancement towards the sapiency of
the perfect Stoic at the cost of his people? It was the test of a man;
and he answered well to it. He elected to lead the troops in person.
This was in the year A.D. 167. The Romans were just then busy burying
their plague-stricken, but the call to arms would brook no delay; and
to arms they went. War, the plague, and the Emperor’s charities had
exhausted the treasury; hence the difficulty in raising supplies and
a force. It was then that he sold by auction the treasures of the
palace and his villas and thus secured the required funds. To swell
the numbers of his troops he compelled the gladiators to serve. This
was the most unpopular act of his reign as it was one of the most
creditable. “He wants to steal our amusements from us,” cried one;
“Aye, to compel us to be philosophers,” cried another of the mob, who
cared for nothing but the _panem et circenses_, the public dole of food
and the public games. The sporting set, the loungers, the fast young
men about town, the brutalised rabble, almost created a revolt against
the act. They cared little for the Empire, if they could but get their
meed of blood; the gladiators were better spent in glutting their evil
eyes than in checking the onrush of those Wandering Nations, who were
one day to sit in those amphitheatres and exult over fallen Rome,
having changed the history of Europe and the world.
The two Emperors led the troops in all the glory of warlike array
through the streets of Rome to the Northern gates. Aurelius, as he
rode in all the Imperial adornment, yet with sad, wistful look and
countenance sickled o’er with the pale cast of thought, contrasted
ominously with the splendour of the pageant of which he was the centre.
He seemed to be far away from it all--far away, yes, in the depths of
his own soul. On one side of him rode Lucius Verus, resplendent and
gay, the hero of levees and banquets; on the other, Faustina, now as
ever outshining all in the great functions of state, her beauty making
her the darling of the mob. Throughout the war she abode with Marcus
faithfully and was called by the army the _Mater castrorum_, the mother
of the camp; and the Emperor thanked the gods for the solace her
fidelity brought to him.
The army reached Venice in A.D. 168. Such had been the energy of their
preparations that a panic seized the barbarian invaders. They begged
for peace; but Marcus had determined that there should be no peace
or a lasting one; the barbarians must be taught a lesson; and he set
about subjugating the tribes one by one. In this he was for a time
successful, thanks mainly to his able generals Pompeianus and Pertinax.
The Quadi were compelled to restore the 60,000 Roman prisoners they
had taken; and in A.D. 169 the Emperors felt justified in returning to
Rome, leaving the completion of the war to their generals. On the way
Verus died and this left Marcus sole ruler. At Rome he paid the highest
honours, civil and religious, to his colleague’s questionable memory.
His stay there was, however, abruptly cut short as, owing to the
acuteness of the war with the Marcomanni and Jazyges, he had to return
again to the fighting line. The Romans once more met with severe
defeats. Two commanders fell; and it was not till A.D. 172 that the
tide of victory turned. In that year the Marcomanni suffered an
overwhelming defeat and the Emperor assumed the title _Germanicus_. But
in the meantime the Quadi had rebelled and driven out their king, who
was a friend of the Romans, and elected one opposed to Rome. Marcus
then turned his attention to these: he set a price of 1,000 pieces of
gold on the head of the rebel king; and on his being betrayed sent him
to Alexandria.
During one of these campaigns against the Quadi occurred the incident
of the “thundering legion”--a story famous in the early Church and much
controverted. It is interesting as bringing Marcus and the Christians
face to face for the first time.
It was during the hot summer months that a legion containing many
Christians was surrounded by the Quadi in a wooded and hilly country.
They were cut off from all means of getting water, and suffered
terribly from the heat and thirst. In these straits, the story goes on
to say, the Christians in the legion knelt and prayed for release; and
lo! suddenly the whole heavens became overcast; a storm gathered and
broke over the opposing forces; rain fell abundantly and the Romans
gathered it in their helmets and in the hollows of their shields,
and drank eagerly and gave to drink to their horses. The barbarians
saw that they must now attack before the Romans recovered strength.
But the rain which had refreshed the Romans turned to blinding hail
against their foes; and the rain and the lightning “burnt them like
oil insomuch as they wounded one another to extinguish the fire with
blood.” Many, seeing such evident favour from heaven for the Roman
cause, went over to their side; and Marcus Aurelius received them
mercifully.
There are many controverted points in connexion with the details of
this story, and the use made of it by the Christian apologists, into
which this is not the place to enter. Certain it is that this Danube
legion got the title of _Fulminata_, at least for some time; even
though the twelfth legion, to whom it properly belonged since the time
of Augustus, were at this time at the Euphrates. It is certain, too,
that everyone, pagan and Christian, regarded the incident as a miracle.
Some attributed it to the prayers of the Emperor himself, and this
view was commemorated in bas-reliefs of the Antonine column, erected
after death to his memory and to be seen to this day. There one sees
represented in the air the winged figure of an old man with streaming
hair and beard, the god of rain, Jupiter Pluvius; while the Romans with
helmets and shields receive the torrents of rain, and their enemies lie
transfixed to the ground by the hail and lightning. Marcus Aurelius
himself was represented in pictures with hands uplifted and praying,
with strange forgetfulness of his barbarities against the Christians,
“Jove to thee do I lift this hand, which hath never shed blood.”
Others attributed this miracle to the Egyptian magician Arnouphis, who
accompanied the army.
That there were Christians “in Cæsar’s household” and round Marcus
Aurelius is certain. That there were many Christians in this legion
cannot reasonably be denied. But the great import of the event for
Tertullian and other Christian apologists, before and after him, was
based on a letter undoubtedly apocryphal, which Marcus Aurelius was
supposed to have written to the Senate, acknowledging that he had been
saved by Christian prayers and forbidding their further persecution.
The truth is that Marcus’ attitude to the Christians was in no way
changed for the better by this incident, but rather for the worse.
As Renan says: “In three or four years the persecution reached the
highest pitch of fury it knew before Decius.” In Africa persecution was
widespread and furious; Sardinia was crowded with Christian exiles; in
Byzantium nearly the whole population was put to death with torture;
while in Asia, where the Christians were especially numerous, officials
vented all their fury on them, interpreting the laws in a way in which
they had never been intended to be applied. “Truly,” to quote Renan
again, “these repeated persecutions were a bloody contradiction to a
century of humanity.” Marcus was not directly responsible for all this
cruelty; he was probably for the most part passive and indifferent.
Some of the Christian apologists certainly looked on him as friendly,
as, for instance, Melito, who wrote to him: “As for yourself, who
cherish the same kind of feeling for us [as the other good Emperors],
with a heightened degree of philanthropy and philosophy, we rest
assured that you will do what we ask you.” But the confidence of the
Christians in Marcus’ humanity and friendship for them and in his
ability to restrain the pagan mob or his own more brutal officials was
ill-founded. This passing incident in the Danube campaign was of little
importance in the history of the Empire, but its interest will never
die as a picturesque detail in the great world-battle of the spirit
then in its acutest stage.
In A.D. 175 Marcus followed up his reduction of the Quadi by that of
the Jazyges. This practically ended the war. Marcus intended securing
the fruit of his conquest by establishing two more Roman provinces; but
a new danger had appeared in the East, and he had to conclude a hasty
peace with the barbarians and to hurry with all speed to Syria.
These victories in the North stirred in him no pride. Here is his sadly
disillusioned comment on the whole campaign: “A spider is proud when
it has caught a fly, and a hunter when he has caught a poor hare, and
another when he has taken a little fish in a net, and another when he
has taken wild boars, _and another when he has taken_ _Sarmatians_.
_Are not these robbers, if thou examinest their principles?_”
He can scarcely have been an inspiring general who took this view of
war; and such sentiments have caused many active spirits to find him
a very dull person indeed. After this we can scarcely wonder at the
remark of one of his generals: “The soldiers don’t understand you;
they don’t know Greek.” In the frieze on the Antonine column which
represents him on horseback, surrounded by banners and triumphant
soldiers, receiving the submission of the kneeling Germans, there is
the same disenchantment in his eyes, the same firm lines of duty on the
lips; there is no flash of enthusiasm, no gloating over the fallen. He
seems absorbed in the thought that all is vanity, and the vanquished
look at him with a puzzled, interested look which has something of
affection in it.
CHAPTER VI
THE BOOK OF MEDITATIONS
It was in the midst of this active strife that Marcus wrote one of the
most introspective and peaceful of books--his Thoughts About Himself
(τὰ εἰς ἑαυτὸν βιβλία)--the twelve books of his Meditations. Few books
have had such influence over men’s lives, and its influence still
abides; and for all students of humanity it will ever be a priceless
document illustrative of one great phase of human thought, and one
great thinker. Surely Stevenson, testifying to the moulding force of
this little book on his own life, did not exaggerate in saying: “The
dispassionate gravity, the noble forgetfulness of self, the tenderness
of others that are there expressed, and were practised on so large a
scale in the life of its writer, make this book a book quite by itself.
No man can read it and not be moved.... When you have read, you carry
away with you a memory of the man himself; it is as though you had
touched a loyal heart, looked into brave eyes and made a noble friend;
there is another bond on you thenceforward, binding you to life and to
the love of virtue.”
The secret of this charm and influence is in the candour and utter
absence of self-consciousness of the book. It reveals the author as he
wished himself to live, a sincere and open life, “lived on the mountain
top--a naked soul more visible than the body which clothed it,” a soul
whose thoughts may be read “as the beloved one reads all things in the
lover’s eyes.” These jottings were the fruit of his frequent searchings
of the heart, the outward expression of the inner life of one who
seemed to live all within, with now and then some golden gleanings from
his favourite moralists. These thoughts he meant to be his strength
against the beggarly elements in his weaker moments. They, with the
_Discourse of Epictetus_, were to be his mainstay. This latter book--a
noble book too--was his à Kempis, and to it he owed the suggestion of
gathering together his own thoughts. Having these he bore his cloister
always with him.
“Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores
and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much.
But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it
is in thy power, whenever thou shalt choose, to retire into thyself.
For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a
man retire than into his own soul, particularly when he has within him
such thoughts that, by looking into them, he is immediately in perfect
tranquillity; and I affirm that tranquillity is nothing else than the
good ordering of the mind. Constantly then give to thyself this retreat
and renew thyself; and let thy principles be brief and fundamental,
which, as soon as thou shalt recur to them, will be sufficient to
cleanse the soul completely, and to send thee back free from all
discontent with the things to which thou returnest.”
“For with what art thou discontented?” he asks himself. The badness of
men? The lot that is assigned to thee out of the universe? The clinging
of corporal things still to thee? The desire of the thing called fame?
Thou hast maxims that will alleviate all these. “This then remains.
Remember to retire into this little territory of thine own, and above
all do not distract or strain thyself, but be free and look at things
as a man, as a human being, as a citizen, as a mortal. But amongst the
things readiest to thy hand to which thou shalt return, let there be
these, which are two: One is that _things_ do not touch the soul, for
they are external and immovable; but our perturbations come only from
the _opinion_ which is within. The other is that all these things which
thou seest change immediately and will no longer be; and constantly
bear in mind how many of these changes thou hast already witnessed. The
Universe is transformation; life is opinion.”
In these last sentences we have the kernel of the Stoic doctrine of
resignation.
“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
The mind can weave its own Universe; and with it it rests to weave it
a fairyland of ordered goodness and beauty. All things without are
fleeting and unstable, shadows that will pass, mists that disappear
at dawn. “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it
so.” “The aids to nobler life are all within.” Man is but part of the
Universe, and his best wisdom is to live in accord with its beautiful
harmony, which disposes all things sweetly for the good of all. It
would be contrary to the Divine Kosmos, the ordering of the great
world-spirit, if what were for the good of all were not for the good of
each:
“If the gods have determined about me and about the things which must
happen to me, they have determined well, for it is not easy even to
imagine a deity without forethought; and as to doing me any harm,
why should they have any desire towards that? For what advantage
would result to them from this, or to the whole, which is the special
object of their providence? But if they have not determined about
me individually, they have certainly determined about the whole at
least, and the things which happen by way of sequence in this general
arrangement I ought to accept with pleasure and to be content with
them. But if they determine about nothing, which it is wicked to
believe, or if we do believe it, let us neither sacrifice, nor pray,
nor swear by them, nor do anything else which we do as if the gods
were present and lived with us--but if, however, the gods determine
about none of those things which concern us, I am able to determine
about myself, and I can inquire about that which is useful; and that
is useful to each man which is conformable to his own constitution
and nature. But my nature is rational and social; my city and country
so far as I am Antoninus is Rome, but so far as I am a man it is the
world. The things then that are useful to these cities are alone useful
to me.”
All this is very beautiful; it is admirable; but it is not human.
An abstract idea never ministered to a mind diseased or healed a
broken heart; and when all is said the Stoic Weltanschauung is a sad
one. As Arnold felt many have felt: “It is impossible to rise from
reading Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius without a sense of constraint and
melancholy, without feeling that the burden laid upon man is well-nigh
greater than he can bear.” But we must add with him: “Honour to the
sages who have felt this, and yet have borne it.” For ourselves we
feel a need of something more personal, something with more love and
sympathy and appeal. How chilling are the maxims of the Porch beside
the glowing verses of the Apostle of Love, which express the essence of
Christianity--an intense personal love for God, an acceptance of all
trials from a motive of love, and a love of our neighbour like unto the
love God bears them.
This was the Christian answer to all the ancient philosophies--the
solution of the world-problem by love; and neither in Marcus Aurelius
nor Plotinus nor any of the great pagans do we find anything at once so
human and divine, anything which so responds to the noblest aspirations
of the human soul without losing sight of its weakness.
But it is not the formal doctrine of the book of the Meditations
which gives it its attraction; it is the spirit of the author it
reveals so intimately. Rarely do we get from philosophers such
familiar self-revelation as this from the beginning of the fifth book:
interesting, even though it suggests a lack of humour and sense of
proportion:
“In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be
present--I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I
dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for
which I was brought into this world? Or have I been made for this,
to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm? But this is more
pleasant--Dost thou exist then to take thy pleasure and not at all for
action or exertion? Dost thou not see the little plants, the little
birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees, working together to put in
order their several parts of the Universe? And art thou unwilling
to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make haste to do
that which is according to thy nature?” Imagine the sight of a spider
rousing a sluggard!
And again in the same book:
“Thou sayest, Men cannot admire the sharpness of thy wits. Be it so;
but there are many other things of which thou canst not say, I am
not formed for them by nature. Show those qualities then which are
altogether in thy power, sincerity, gravity, endurance of labour,
aversion to pleasure, contentment with thy portion and with few things,
benevolence, frankness, no love of superfluity, freedom from trifling
magnanimity. Dost thou not see how many qualities thou art immediately
able to exhibit, in which there is no excuse of natural incapacity and
unfitness, and yet thou still remainest voluntarily below the mark? or
art thou compelled through being defectively furnished by nature to
murmur, and to be stingy, and to flatter and to find fault with thy
poor body, and to try to please men, and to make great display, and
to be restless in thy mind? No, by the gods; but thou mightest have
been delivered from these things long ago. Only if in truth thou canst
be charged with being rather slow and dull of comprehension, thou
must exert thyself about this also, not neglecting it nor yet taking
pleasure in thy dullness.”
Stoic optimism can scarcely be said to have solved the mysteries
of evil and the unrest of the soul, or satisfied the craving for
happiness, for guidance and support which is deep down in every heart.
Yet the followers of that school were a good influence on a corrupt
world. We feel in all the book of the Meditations a calm strength, a
forbearance, a perseverance despite failure in good resolutions, which
does all honour to its author living in the most sensual surroundings.
And in Marcus this stern character is relieved by touches of tender
affection and gratitude constantly recurring. They reveal a character
far inferior to that of the Christian Saint; nobody except some of our
neo-pagan paradoxists will look for such perfection in him; the marvel
is that he so often reminds us of them and approaches them even afar.
In none of those pagan heroes do we find that blending of strength
and humility, of austerity and gentlest love, that touch of the Light
Divine and that reflex of Christ, which remove a St. Francis de Sales
or a St. Vincent de Paul a whole heaven’s breadth from them and make it
an irreverence to compare the one to the other.
But we do find wonderful things in them. Take, for instance, the nine
considerations which Marcus proposed for himself as an aid to bearing
with those who had offended him; they are given in the eleventh book,
and the second of them well shows the imperfection inseparable from
pagan virtue, even the highest: (1) All men are born for one another.
(2) Consider the private vices of those that have offended thee. (3)
If they do wrong it is involuntarily and in ignorance. (4) Thou also
doest many things wrong, and thou art a man like others; and even if
thou dost abstain from certain faults still thou hast the disposition
to commit them, though either through cowardice or concern about
reputation or some such mean motive thou dost abstain from such faults.
(5) You may be judging them rashly. (6) “Man’s life is only a moment,
and after a short time we are all laid out dead.” (7) Your annoyance is
due not to those acts but to your own impressions. (He says elsewhere:
“How easy it is to repel and to wipe away every impression which is
troublesome or unsuitable, and immediately to be in all tranquillity.”)
(8) Anger and vexation are a greater evil than the thing which causes
them. (9) One of the most amiable passages in the Meditations:
“Consider that benevolence is invincible if it be genuine, and not an
affected smile and acting a part. For what will the most violent man do
to thee if thou continuest to be of a benevolent disposition towards
him, and if, as opportunity offers, thou gently admonishest him and
calmly correctest his errors at the very time when he is trying to do
thee harm, saying, Not so, my child: we are constituted by nature for
something else: I shall certainly not be injured, but thou art injuring
thyself, my child--and show him with gentle tact and by general
principles that this is so, and that even bees do not do as he does,
nor any animals, which are formed by nature to be gregarious. And thou
must do this neither with any double meaning nor in way of reproach,
but affectionately and without any rancour in thy soul; and not as
if thou wert lecturing him, nor yet that any by-stander may admire,
but when he is alone.” Again he asks himself what have the evil deeds
of others to do with the intellect’s abiding pure, self-possessed,
temperate, and just. Nothing at all: “Even as if one standing by a
sweet and transparent fountain were to utter abuse against it, and
it ceased not to pour forth its salutary waters. And if one cast mud
or filth therein, it would speedily dissipate and wash it away, and
would in no wise be stained by it. How shalt thou be an ever-flowing
spring, and not a cistern? Grow every hour into freedom, united with
gentleness, simplicity and modesty.”
The view of his fellow-men which Marcus expresses is a curious mixture
of charity, pity, and contempt. He frequently strengthened himself
against human respect by considering that the evil lives of other men
made their opinion contemptible. These passages seem to reveal a nature
tinged with spiritual pride and aloofness. He insists time and again on
the fellowship of men, as fellow-citizens of one great polity: but he
has a profound sense of their folly and baseness too. Yet his lonely
nature craved for friendship with kindred souls, though seemingly
fastidious in its friendship. With his detached attitude towards his
fellow-men it is little wonder that he had but few friends; and he
was conscious of it. In a letter to Fronto he mentions this and also
in a passage from the Meditations: “Solace your departure with the
reflection: I am leaving a life in which my own associates, for whom I
have so strived, prayed, and thought, themselves wish for my removal,
their hope being that they will perchance gain in freedom thereby.”
This note of world-weariness and disillusion as regards everything
men prize recurs again and again in the course of the Meditations: it
runs through his doctrines of resignation, of charity and forbearance,
of self-restraint and peace. Its recurrence in the many--perhaps too
many--quotations in this chapter may have wearied the reader: yet I do
not regret that I have made it prominent, for it was the most intense
idea in the Emperor’s mind, and surely strange enough to be interesting
when found in the ruler of the greatest of Empires at the height of
its civilisation. I hope, too, that these quotations will initiate the
reader into the spirit of the great Stoic. There was no question of
giving an exact account of the system expounded in the Meditations:
for there is no such system; Marcus Aurelius was more interested in
virtue than in learning; he would rather feel compunction than know its
definition.
CHAPTER VII
LAST DAYS IN ROME
The hasty summons to the East which interrupted Marcus’ northern
campaign was due to the revolt of one of his best generals, Avidius
Cassius.
Cassius until now had been loyal to the Emperor and had served him well
in the war against the Parthians. In that war the worthless debauchee
Lucius Verus, Marcus’ colleague, had been nominally in command, but
really confined his campaigns to the voluptuous groves of Daphne,
while Cassius bore the brunt of the fight. Further, Cassius had by
iron discipline restored the efficiency of the Eastern legions. At
first, like all reformers, he was cordially hated; this hatred found
expression in mutiny; but, on this being suppressed, gave place to
respect and even to popularity. It were well for Cassius had he
confined his zeal for reform to the army; but he wished to reform the
Emperor and the court also. His murmurings became public property, and
Lucius Verus wrote to Marcus warning him against him: “I would you had
him closely watched. For he is a general disliker of us and of our
doings; he is gathering together an enormous treasure, and he makes
an open jest of our literary pursuits. You, for instance, he calls
a philosophising old woman, and me a dissolute buffoon and a scamp.
Consider what you would have done. For my part I bear the fellow no
ill-will; but again I say take care that he does not do mischief to you
and to your children.”
The answer of Marcus gives a most searching insight into his character.
Steeped in the most obstinately logical fatalism, it is yet generous
and noble and “breathes the very soul of careless magnanimity reposing
upon conscious innocence”:--
“I have read your letter, and I will confess to you I think it more
scrupulously timid than becomes an Emperor, and timid in a way
unsuitable to the spirit of our times. Consider this--if the Empire is
destined to Cassius by the decrees of Providence, in that case it will
not be in our power to put him to death, however much we may desire
to do so. You know your great-grandfather’s saying, ‘No prince ever
killed his own heir’; no man, that is, ever yet prevailed against one
whom Providence had marked out as his successor. On the other hand, if
Providence opposes him, then, without any cruelty on our part, he will
fall spontaneously into some snare prepared for him by destiny.... For
Cassius, then, let him keep his present temper and inclinations, and
the more so, being (as he is) a good general, austere in discipline,
brave, and one whom the State cannot afford to lose. For as to what
you insinuate, that I ought to provide for my children’s interests, by
putting this man judiciously out of the way, very frankly I say to you,
‘Perish, my children, if Avidius shall deserve more attachment than
they, and if it shall prove salutary to the State that Cassius should
triumph rather than that the children of Marcus should survive.’”
Gradually Cassius had been strengthening his forces; and at length in
A.D. 175 openly raised the standard of revolt against the reign of
the philosophers. His manifesto shows how deeply the military party
resented the ascendancy of men who seemed to have no qualification for
office except their long beards and eccentric life. Jibes such as this
were common: “His beard is worth ten thousand sesterces to him; come,
we shall have to pay goats a salary next!” Avidius admits that Marcus
is a worthy man, but he is letting the State go to ruin, while “hungry
blood-suckers batten on her vitals.” He longs for the old strict regime
of Cato. “Marcus Antoninus is a scholar; he enacts the philosopher;
and he tries conclusions concerning the four elements and upon the
nature of the soul; and he discourses learnedly upon the _Honestum_;
and concerning the _Summum Bonum_ he is unanswerable. Meanwhile, is
he learned in the interests of the State? Can he argue a point upon
the public economy?” And he adds: “You see what a host of sabres is
required, what a host of impeachments, sentences, executions, before
the commonwealth can resume its ancient integrity!”
A rumour that Marcus was dead hastened the outbreak of the revolt and
won support for Cassius. But it was quickly contradicted; and this
caused the collapse of his forces. Officers and men deserted him, and
he was at length assassinated by one of his own followers.
Meanwhile Marcus was coming with all haste from the Danube, accompanied
by Faustina. When they reached Cappadocia, at the foot of Mount Taurus,
Faustina died, to his great grief, and the tongues of the slanderers
were silent at length. The last accusation against her was that she
had been privy to this very revolt, and had promised to marry Cassius
in the event of its success. But to all these charges we must give
a verdict of “not proven”; they are for the most part unreliable
gossip of the most gossiping of historians. But even though she was
not guilty of all that was laid to her charge, yet she seems to have
wearied of the over-wisdom of Marcus and his friends: she lived a
different life and had different tastes from his. Yet even after her
death Marcus cherished her memory. He had a temple built to her honour
on the spot where she died, and at his request the Senate decreed her
deification. The visitor to Rome may still see in the Capitoline Museum
a bas-relief in which she is represented being borne up to heaven by
Fame, while Marcus follows her from the earth with that look of tender,
wistful pathos which characterises most of the representations of
him. In decreeing these honours, as also in establishing an institute
for orphans to be called _Faustinianæ_, after her name, he was but
following step by step the action of his father Antoninus on the death
of the elder Faustina.
When Marcus reached Antioch the revolt was already ended. One of the
assassins, hoping for reward, brought the head of Cassius to the
Emperor; but he put him from him with indignation and loathing. His one
regret was that he had been deprived of the pleasure of pardoning his
enemy.
But the good deed was done, if not to Cassius, at any rate to his wife
and relatives. Many urged him to wreak his vengeance on them. Faustina,
before her death, had insisted that he “should show no mercy to men
that showed none to you, nor would have shown any to me or my sons in
case they had gained the victory”; she would have had him punish the
army also severely as accomplices. Marcus replied that he admired her
zeal for their family, but said that he would spare Cassius’ wife and
children and son-in-law and commend them to the mercy of the Senate.
As to his other relatives: “Why should I speak of pardon to them, who
indeed have done no wrong, and are blameless even in purpose.” The
Senate granted his requests, and the household of Cassius was amply
provided for by the generosity of the Emperor.
We are wont to think of the forgiving to seventy times seven times
as the peculiar and most characteristic virtue of Christianity as it
assuredly is the most beautiful of the natural virtues. Yet it was
a virtue familiar to the wise ones of the Stoics, and perhaps not a
difficult virtue to those who adopted their philosophy of life. If
nothing matters and all is in very truth but vanity of vanities and the
soul is steeped in this conviction, the disposition to look on life’s
worries, whatever their sources, as but petty and trifling, is natural
and spontaneous. For one with the Stoic temperament hard things are but
the whetstone of the will, and herein precisely lies the danger of that
temperament from the Christian point of view. The Stoic will, if not
well-ordered, is a harsh grinding thing which sucks in and crushes the
beautiful things of life as grist beneath its wheels. It exults in its
strength with a forbidding and unlovely pride, so different from the
beautiful diffidence of Christian strength, which loves not the beauty
of the creatures less, but the beauty of the Creator more, and with a
kind of supernatural Epicureanism renounces the beauty of the fleeting
for the sake of the beauty of which it is but an image far removed, the
beauty of Him whose beauty is older than the hills and will abide when
they have crumbled away.
It is to the credit of Marcus Aurelius that even in this he avoided
to a great extent the faults of his virtues; it is the touch of
emotion in his writings and in those of the other later Stoics of the
Empire which gives them their charm beyond the earlier members of the
school. We have many indications that his soul was open to the ἀπορροὴ
τοῦ κάλλους, the inflow of beauty from sensible things, while his
correspondence with Fronto shows that his nature was affectionate.
Throughout the Meditations also we see the reflection of the constant
struggle which he had with his own nature. One who did not feel deeply
would never have insisted so much on the necessity for control of the
feelings. It is a fallacy to think that the Stoic is necessarily dead
to humanity. In a sense, and in theory at least, he is the truest lover
of man and the human. His sole vocation in life is the good of the
whole; the _caritas generis humani_ (love for his fellow-men), if not
the central point of their system and far from the Christian ideal of
charity in beauty and efficacy, yet was present and active in them.
The Stoic must check his feelings but not suppress them. It suffices
that the barrier of the will be raised and strengthened day by day and
then the feelings may surge up behind it, ready for right use; but as
servants not as masters. Thus the paradox is true that those have often
the strongest emotions whose emotions are most in check.
On his way back from the East the Emperor passed through Athens. There
he found much that attracted him and much that repelled. The schools
of philosophy were his chief interest, but he liked not their sophisms
and disputations, and the irresponsibility which seemed irreverent
towards the true philosophy whose end was life. When he thinks of
the dialecticians of his day he thanks the gods that he did not make
more proficiency in rhetoric, poetry, and the other studies “in which
I should perhaps have been completely engaged, if I had seen that I
was making progress in them.” He thinks with gratitude of Rusticus as
having taught him “not to be led astray to sophistic emulation, nor
to writing on speculative matters, nor to delivering little hortatory
orations, nor to showing myself off as a man who practises much
discipline or does benevolent acts in order to make a display; and to
abstain from rhetoric and fine-writing.” “_Quid tibi de generibus et
speciebus?_” said à Kempis.
But though the spirit of the schools was repugnant to his sincerity,
yet, true to his leading principle of fostering culture, he founded
several chairs in what we may call the University of Athens.
While at Athens he was also initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries.
This act was not with him merely an act of State-policy, an act of
condescension to an alien religion such as other Emperors often showed;
nor was it, as it was with Hadrian, the outcome of a restless desire
to pry into the novel and the mysterious. With Marcus Aurelius it was
probably a sincere act of religion. There was much in the symbolism
and ritual of the mysteries, its hymns and processions and dramatic
representations resembling the mystery plays of the Middle Ages, in its
fasting and nightly torchlight processions by the sea-shore and through
the plain, which would appeal to his ritualistic nature. The doctrines
of expiation and a future life, the καλαὶ ἐλπίδες--the fair hopes of
Eleusis, must have had an especial attraction for him.
As to his own religious views, he certainly was not the Agnostic which
Renan would have him be. “In every time and place,” he says, “it
rests with thyself to use the event of the hour religiously: at all
seasons worship the gods.” He asserts that it is impious to deny the
existence of the gods, and he rests his theories of right and wrong
on the supposition of their existence. True, as Renan points out, he
often holds out to himself the alternative of their non-existence,
but even then it is only to assert the existence of the Divinity in
another form. He says that if they did not exist, yet truth to our own
nature would be a sufficient motive for right action; but our nature
is for him but a part of the nature which is Divine, and derives its
sanction from its participation in this supreme nature. His religion
was a strange mixture of monotheism, polytheism, and pantheism;
but to atheism he never really consents. Strictly speaking, he had
no philosophy or theology; for he was not interested in systems as
such. Yet he never wavered in his loyalty to the national religion,
however much or little of it he really believed when he stood at the
sacrificial altar in pontifical robes and chanted the ancient hymns and
formularies, all of which he knew by heart.
Indeed, he was more deeply interested in the practical than in the
pure reason; and conduct was more for him than dogma: hence it is
that his thoughts are so intensely human and universal in their
appeal. His nature, however, had little in common with the light and
frivolous agnosticism of Renan and the dilettanti; and only a very
subjective interpretation of the Meditations can eliminate from them
the “supernatural” element. Renan recognises this element to a certain
extent, and accounts it a blemish “which, however, does not affect
the marvellous beauty of the work as a whole.” It is for him, as for
Matthew Arnold, the gospel of those who walk by sight and not by faith,
“who have no faith in the supernatural”; and it “will never grow old
because it affirms no dogma.”
It is useless to inquire further into the nature of his religious
beliefs. He would have been at a loss to define them himself. The
great salient feature is here as elsewhere the tragedy of a great moral
nature in the throes of superstition, of a beautiful life deprived of
its fit setting: a tragedy too common in our own days filling wide
spaces with spiritual waste and hopeless sighs, and making hearts
desolate for that their light is gone out or flickers low.
On his return to Rome, Marcus celebrated a splendid triumph, shared in
by Commodus, over the conquered German peoples. It was against his own
better feelings and in concession to Roman vulgarity that he endured
this ordeal. He often expresses his disgust for these functions and,
as we have seen, regarded conquerors as no better than robbers. The
shouts of the mob, the long train of captives, the reeking public
banquets were little to his taste; and for him there was no need of the
attendant who usually stood behind the conqueror on the triumphal car
to remind him that he was a man lest he should perhaps bring down on
himself the wrath of the gods by an unseemly arrogance.
There was less need than ever on this day; for with Commodus by his
side a great sorrow overshadowed him. He had nominated Commodus as his
successor to avoid a worse evil--the evil of civil war, which would
certainly have arisen had he chosen one more worthy from his own
philosophic circle. Yet Commodus, though still a youth, had already
given full reign to his passions; and Marcus can scarcely have failed
to foresee the disaster which he was to bring upon the Empire. The
shadow of this sorrow and of the great loneliness which was his during
his later years, grows darker and darker over the last books of the
Meditations.
As Renan has remarked, they have but one thought, that of passing
as gently as may be from the world. In the earlier books he gathers
strength for the struggle of life; now all is preparation for death.
The evil plight of public affairs also justified this world-weariness.
The signs of decay were already visible in Rome: the handwriting had
been seen on the walls of the Capitol. Even Renan has to admit that
“in reality the progress effected during the reigns of Antoninus and
Marcus Aurelius had been merely superficial. It had been limited to a
varnish of hypocrisy and external professions, which people assumed
in order to be in harmony with the two wise Emperors. The masses were
grossly materialistic; the army was decaying; the laws alone had been
changed for the better.” Plague, famine, and war had done their work
of death. Marcus did all he could to alleviate the misery; but bad
finance had left him helpless to cope with such universal disaster. And
to fill his cup of bitterness news was brought that his old enemies on
the Danube were in arms again. He must needs, ill and heartsick though
he was, gird himself once more and prepare to leave Rome for the wild
North--this time never to return.
CHAPTER VIII
“THE END OF THE OLD WORLD”
The peace hastily made in A.D. 175 was broken two years later. The
local commanders again proved incompetent to drive back the barbarian
hordes, and Marcus had once more to assume the command in person.
This time he decided to take with him Commodus, in the hope perhaps
that, like so many of the Roman nobles, worthless at home, he might
develop in the provinces those powers for government and war which were
innate in that race of rulers; or, at the very least, in the hope of
strengthening him against effeminate influences by the hard northern
winters and the privations of camp life.
Before leaving Rome the Emperor gave a pitiful exhibition of his
powerlessness to diffuse the light of his own philosophy amongst his
subjects; or else of the strange grip, growing stronger as the shades
drew round him, which the pagan superstitions had upon his soul. For
seven days before his departure the city was the scene of the wildest
religious extravagances. The older gods of the West shared the honours
with their lighter brethren from the East and South. The number of
white steers sacrificed was so great that some of the wits circulated
an epigrammatical petition from them to the Emperor: “The white oxen to
the Emperor Marcus Aurelius: If you return as conqueror, that will be
the end of us.” Sumptuous feasts were prepared before every temple at
which the statues of the gods reclined: and Rome reeled in mad revel.
Quacks from all parts of the Empire gathered in Rome and flourished
during those days.
Lucian has left us a vivid picture of one of these. This was Alexander
of Abonoteichos, the prince of impostors. He had started a new religion
in Paphlagonia with mysteries and rites based on those of Eleusis. This
had quickly spread over the East; and with the other Eastern impostures
found a welcome at Rome. Rutilianus, a Roman senator of consular
rank, became its patron and zealous advocate. The new mysteries
were celebrated during three days with scenes of wild excitement
and immorality. Even the friends of Marcus and Marcus himself were
deceived. During the Northern wars, at a word from Alexander’s sacred
serpent, Marcus had solemnly presided in the robes of the Pontifex
Maximus over a most ridiculous ceremony. The Romans were assured that
if they cast two lions alive into the Danube they would be victorious
over the enemy arrayed against them on the opposite bank. The lions
were cast in with all ceremony; but, unfortunately for Alexander’s
reputation and Marcus’ credulity, they were beaten to death on reaching
the other bank, and the Romans, when they crossed, fared no better.
The Emperor went through a ceremony at this time which must have
been no less revolting to him than it is to us. This was the ancient
ceremony of the casting of the dart, a ceremony almost as old as Rome
itself. The Emperor went in procession to the temple of Bellona,
surrounded by a mob of fanatics, who cut into their living flesh with
knives and whips and then lapped the streaming blood--to honour and
placate their Goddess of War! Arrived at the Temple he hurled the dart
towards the North--where his enemies were already pressing his armies
hard.
When he had done all that he considered necessary to appease the gods
or to soothe the superstitious fears of his subjects, Marcus at length
set out for the scene of war in A.D. 178. Of this war very little is
known. The dream of Augustus and many of the other Emperors, given up
as hopeless by them--the extension of the Roman frontier to the Elbe
and the consolidation of Roman power in the North--was almost realised.
But the Dark Shadow which had crossed Marcus’ path so often before drew
nigh once more and for the last time. On the eve of a great and, it
would seem, a final conquest, illness and death conquered the Conqueror.
It was in the spring of A.D. 180 that the plague which had taken
off half the population of the Empire came to claim the life of the
Emperor. He fell ill, probably at Vienna, on the 10th of March. His
constitution had never been robust and the hardships of the last years
had still further weakened it. Hence he recognised immediately that
this illness was to be unto death; and is said to have at once welcomed
its approach. Continual disappointment had killed all hope within him,
and with hope the pain of hope unfulfilled; and so he had no regrets
now that that strange spirit which had ever dogged him once more passed
by at midnight over the dreary northern plains and entering into his
tent dashed the cup of victory from his lips. He asked Commodus as a
last request to complete the war and then prepared for the end. For
seven days the illness lasted. On the sixth he bade farewell to his
friends. He spoke to them of the vanity of life and the easiness of
death; commended to them the interests of the State and Commodus, “if
he should prove worthy”; and all this with a great calm. On the seventh
day he would see nobody except Commodus, and him only for a short time,
with a last despairing hope perhaps of inspiring at least one noble
sentiment into that monster of brutality. Then he seemed to sleep; and
his sleep deepened into death.
It was a death free from pomp, lonely and detached as his life had
been. But death, in whatever form it came, seems to have had no terrors
for him. He had often faced the thought of it and always to persuade
himself that in it there was nothing to fear, but perhaps much to hope
for.
His confidence in facing death sprang from no sure hope of personal
immortality. He believed in an immortality for both soul and body and
that the gods would care for both; but whether the life beyond would be
a continuance of the personal life of time, or whether this human soul
should be swallowed up in the great world-soul he knew not. “You have
embarked upon life: when you have made your voyage debark without more
ado. If you happen to land in another world there will be gods to take
care of you there; but if it be your fortune to drop into nothingness,
why then you will be no more solicited with pleasure and pain. Then
you will have done drudging for your outer covering, which is the more
unworthy in proportion as that which serves it is worthy: for the one
is all soul, intelligence and divinity, whereas the other is dirt and
corruption.”
Yet elsewhere, though admitting the possibility of the absorption of
the human soul into the world-soul he rejects the possibility of utter
annihilation. “What is sprung from earth dissolves to earth again and
heaven-born things fly to their native seat.” But again he adds: “When
a man dies, and the spirit is let loose into the air, it holds out for
some time, after which it is changed, diffused, or knotted into flame,
or else absorbed into the generative principle of the Universe.” This
is the best he can promise us: yet how miserable a mockery of human
aspirations it is! how unsatisfying to the longings of the soul, which
seeks in the spiritual for the most truly and intensely real and in the
spiritual and the spiritualised, thus truly real, for the truest beauty!
A philosophy which takes the brightness out of both lives, here and
beyond, reducing both to a dull grey mist, can never be a spiritual
force, and, if it prevailed, must result in the reversal of all
ordinary judgments of value. This was a conclusion frankly accepted by
the Stoics, and they carried it even to the extent of the abnegation
of man’s most absorbing desire--the will to live. A man may even deny
this: for adequate cause he may, nay, even _should_, take away his
own life. In ordinary circumstances man should stand at his post till
dismissed by his commander; he should play out the tragedy of life to
the end as arranged by the dramatist: for just cause he may quit the
stage before his part is played out. The reason is that between life
and death there is nothing to choose; they are but successive stages
of one and the same natural process. Marcus held that man may quit
life if he finds it intolerable. True, he says that life ought not
to be intolerable: it is our own fault if it is. But supposing that
through weakness we cannot bear it, then “we may give it the slip”;
and again because death is not the serious thing men imagine it to
be: “What great matter is this business of dying? If the gods exist,
you can suffer nothing, for they will do you no harm; and if they do
not, or if they take no care of us mortals--why, then a world without
gods or providence is not a world worth a man’s while to live in. But
in truth the being of the gods and their concern in human affairs is
beyond dispute.” If a man is of such a character or placed in such
circumstances that for him a virtuous life is morally impossible, then
Marcus says he has just cause for suicide, “for reason would rather
that you were nothing than that you were a knave.” “You may live now,
if you please, as you would choose to do if you were near to dying. But
suppose people will not let you--why, then, give life the slip, but by
no means make a misfortune of it. If the room smokes, I leave it, and
there is an end; for why should one be concerned at the matter?”
Thus did he try by force of argument, often the merest sophistry, to
conjure away the dread realities of human existence. But when death
called for one after another of his children, he realised how futile
his doctrine was. Yet it was the best he could adhere to, and he did
but share in the cruel disenchantment that comes sooner or later to all
who follow a false philosophy of life. The self-deception which makes
these systems plausible in the abstract vanishes at the cold touch of
death or at a thrill of love from a kindred heart. All that is most
sacred in life, its morality and its ideals, the foundations of society
and the aspirations of the individual; the problems that vex men as
to the ultimate grounds of obligation, beauty and love; the problems
of freedom, of evil and of immortality; the need of the human heart
for guidance and support can receive no adequate explanation except in
the acceptance of integral Christianity--namely Catholicism. Hence the
folly of our neo-pagan revival. Paganism was tried and is dead with the
souls and the hopes it slew; the future lies with a vigorous fighting
Catholicity. It is vain to attempt to resurrect the corpse which
Constantine prepared for burial. Wisdom and duty bid us follow the
system which our whole nature cries out for: reason alone or sentiment
alone is a blind guide; truth lies in the leading of the whole man.
Yet the moral greatness which Marcus had attained in spite of all the
limitations of his system was made very clear by the universal grief
and reverence which was expressed at his death. When his body was
brought to Rome the whole city went into mourning. Henceforth we are
told men spoke of him no longer by his imperial titles, but old men
spoke of him as “Marcus, my son”; young men, as “Marcus, my father”;
and men of his own age, as “Marcus, my brother”; such was the affection
of all for him. The decreeing of divine honours was not in his case, as
it was in that of so many of the Emperors, a formality or a burlesque:
it was from the heart; the _vox populi_ proclaimed him “propitious
god” before the Senate passed the formal decree. And, truly, as St.
Augustine said of Plato, we might well pardon the pagans if they
raised a temple to him rather than to the gods they honoured. For more
than a century after his death his statue was to be seen amongst the
household gods in the hearth-shrines of the whole Western Empire, and
men looked askance at a chance defaulter to this cult. He was the model
of succeeding Emperors, and Christian writers vied with pagans in their
praises of him. Even in our own time that strange, melancholy figure
is dear to all that know him: there is a pathos and an interest in his
life and thoughts which is unique: “Everyone of us wears mourning in
his heart for Marcus Aurelius as though he died but yesterday.”
Renan was right in this; but we cannot admit his further statement that
“the day of the death of Marcus Aurelius can be taken as the decisive
moment at which the ruin of ancient civilisation was decided.” It was
decided long before; perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say that
the day of Marcus’ accession was the first day of decadence, as it
was the last of the old type of Roman rule. But in truth the fate of
empires never hangs on a single day or a single ruler. They grow and
they decay over long centuries: the seed of life and the rot of death
is working long before its effects appear without; and in the reign
of Marcus the Empire was already doomed. The old Roman virtues--those
especially which form the _morale_ of an imperial race--strict probity,
sacrifice of individual interests to the good of the State, initiative,
enterprise and the fighting qualities were all dissolving. In their
place was being developed the citizen, who is ever the product of
centralisation--the man without originality, devotion, or virtue; who
is interested in subtlety rather than in truth; wrapped up in his own
petty world, incapable of heroism or sacrifice.
In the midst of this death there was a strange stirring of life in the
North and in the East--a life which was to feed on the death of the
Empire. The forbears of Alaric and his Goths had already knocked at the
gate and announced his coming. The eloquent pleadings of the Christian
apologists addressed to Marcus himself told of a new stirring in the
spiritual and intellectual world--of a new vision which he and his
friends could not or would not see; and the brave words and noble deeds
of the martyrs told that there was life in this new creed--yes! life
and love to conquer Stoic apathy and pagan death.
CHAPTER IX
THE MARTYRS OF CHRIST
In reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius we frequently are struck
by the almost Christian spirit which permeates them. Mr. F. H. Myers
has well said: “Whatever winds of the Spirit may sweep over the sea of
souls the life of Marcus will remain for ever the high-water mark of
the unassisted virtue of man.” So sublime and seemingly preternatural
is his spirit that men in all ages have asked and answered in various
ways the questions: “Has Christianity anything better to offer us?
and if so, in what precisely does it consist?” It is as an answer to
these questions that I introduce this brief reference to the story of
the Martyrs, preferably a few of the many that suffered under Marcus
himself.
During his reign the Church endured a persecution severer than any it
had yet known. How far he was personally responsible for this we cannot
tell. He was not wholly guilty nor yet wholly innocent. He certainly
ordered the torture and execution of the Martyrs of Lyons; his most
intimate friend sentenced St. Justin to death at Rome; and his most
trusted lawyer condemned St. Felicitas and her sons; but, on the other
hand, many of the persecutions were due to the anger of the mob, and
withal he knew not what he did. The Christians were to him merely an
uncultured and fanatical sect without a single redeeming virtue. In the
only passage in the Meditations where he mentions them he attributes
their constancy in death to sheer perverseness. After expressing his
admiration for a soul, “which is ready, if at any moment it must be
separated from the body, to be extinguished, or dissolved, or to
continue to exist,” he adds, “but this readiness must come from a man’s
own judgment, not from mere obstinacy as with the Christians, but with
considerateness, with gravity, so as to be persuasive without tragic
show.” With such a view of the Christian character it is not strange
that he felt no qualms in sanctioning, though he did not instigate,
the first persecution that bore the semblance of being universal and
systematic.
Furthermore, Roman tradition was law for him; and Roman tradition
was very clear as to the treatment which Christians deserved. The
superstitious pagans attributed all public calamities to the wrath
of their gods, and this wrath to the contempt which the Christians
showed for the pagan idols. As Tertullian puts it: “The Christians are
the cause of all disasters, of all public calamities. If the Tiber
floods Rome, if the Nile does not flood the plains, if the heavens are
closed, if the earth trembles, if a famine takes place or a war or
a plague, immediately a cry is raised ‘The Christians to the lions!
to death with the Christians!’” Now, the reign of Marcus was one of
singular calamities, all the more aggravating because unforeseen and
irresistible and devastating the city and the Empire at the culminating
point of their prosperity. The reign opened with wars and rumours
of wars on the frontiers; the Tiber overflowed Rome; there had been
a plague and a famine. Here truly was the anger of the gods against
the Roman welfare--the _deorum ira in rem Romanam_ of Tacitus. The
mob howled for Christian blood; and Marcus was too weak or too little
concerned to resist. Antoninus, Hadrian, Trajan had consented to
the torture of the fanatics, though they had not shared the popular
prejudices against them; many of the lawyers and philosophers had
counselled it for the good of the State; why should he say no? His
better nature probably revolted from such brutality, but it is the
misfortune of diffident conventionalists, such as he, that they
sacrifice their better instincts to the received views of ruder natures.
The first victims of the superstition of the Romans and the
conventionality of their Emperor were St. Felicitas and her sons.
Their trial and death forms a celebrated episode in the history of the
martyrs. It well illustrates the spirit of the martyrs[A] and the great
things which the Church was doing for the weak ones of the world; how
that out of the mouths of babes and sucklings she was perfecting praise
through the strong love of Christ which was the inheritance of her
children.
[A] This is admitted even by those scholars who regard, and rightly it
would seem, these Acts as a historical romance, _but founded on facts_.
Since the main facts are true, and my concern is to illustrate the
spirit of the martyrs, this testimony seemed sufficient justification
for quoting the Acts.
The Act tells us that “owing to indignation amongst the Pontiffs,
Felicitas, a woman of high rank, was struck down with her seven most
Christian sons.” Her life had been a source of great edification to her
fellow-Christians, and the Pontiffs “seeing that, thanks to her, the
good repute of the Christian name was growing, spoke of her to Augustus
Antoninus (i.e., Marcus Aurelius), saying: ‘This widow and her sons
are outraging our gods to our great peril. If she does not pay homage
to the gods, your majesty must know that they will be so angry that
they cannot be appeased.’ Then the Emperor ordered the Prefect of the
City to compel her and her sons to appease the wrath of the gods by
sacrifice.”
This Prefect of the City was Publius Salvius Julianus, the most
distinguished and trusted of Roman lawyers; and before him Felicitas
was now brought for trial. He attempted first by blandishments, then by
threats, to persuade her to sacrifice. She replied: “You cannot entice
me by blandishments nor frighten me by threats, for I have within me
the Holy Spirit, Who keeps me from being conquered by the devil: this
is my ground for assurance, that living I shall overcome thee and when
dead I shall triumph still more.” “At least let your children live.”
“My children live if they do not sacrifice to idols; but if they commit
such a crime, they shall go to eternal death.” Thus ended this first
interview between Publius, a Roman of the old school, with a strong
sense of justice as he understood it, but understanding it only as
identified with Roman law, and this Roman matron of noble birth, who
had left the darkness for the light.
Next day she and her sons were again brought before the Prefect. “Have
pity on your sons,” said he, “those fine young fellows yet in the
flower of their youth.” Felicitas replied: “Your pity is impious and
your advice cruel.” Turning to her children she added: “Lift up your
eyes to heaven, my children, look aloft where Christ awaits you with
His saints. Do battle for your souls and show yourselves faithful
in the love of Christ.” At this Publius ordered her to be buffeted.
“Darest thou in my presence counsel contempt for the Emperor’s orders!”
Then he called each of the seven sons in turn. He cajoled; he
threatened; but to no avail. The first, Januarius, replied: “The wisdom
of the Lord sustains me and will enable me to overcome all.” He was
beaten and sent back to prison, but the second was not cowed: “We adore
one only God,” he replied, “to Whom we offer the sacrifice of a pious
devotion. Think not that you can separate me or any of my brothers
from the love of the Lord Jesus Christ. Even under the threat of blows
and your unjust designs our faith cannot be conquered or changed.” To
the third son, Philip, the Prefect said: “Our Lord, the Emperor, has
ordered that you sacrifice to the all-powerful gods.” The boy replied:
“They are neither gods nor all-powerful but worthless, wretched,
insensible images, and those who sacrifice to them will incur eternal
risk.” Silvanus made a similar reply and then Alexander was sent
forward. Him the judge tried to win by kindness: “Have pity on thine
age and on thy life, still in the prime of its youth. Be not obstinate
but do what most will please our Sovereign: sacrifice to the gods that
you may become one of the friends of Cæsar and gain both your life and
the good-will of the Emperors.” The privilege of being “a friend of
Cæsar” was a great one. These _amici Cæsaris_ formed a narrow circle
round the Emperor, and the honour was coveted even by the highest in
Rome. But it was no temptation to the Christian youth; he had a higher
title: “I am the servant of Christ; I confess Him with my lips; I
remain devoted to Him with my heart; I adore Him unceasingly. My years,
so weak, as you see, have yet the prudence of old age and adore one
only God. Thy gods and their adorers shall perish.” The two remaining
children were equally unyielding, equally ardent in their love for
Christ. They were all sent back to prison and Publius drew up a report
of the process and sent it to the Emperor. What were Marcus’ thoughts
on reading it, if he read it at all.
Whatever his thoughts, he ordered the martyrs different tortures under
various officials in different parts of the city. The first child died
under the lash shod with lead, the second and third under the bludgeon;
the fourth was hurled from a precipice, while the remaining three and
Felicitas herself were mercifully beheaded. The reason for the severity
and variety of the sentences may have been, as Allard suggests, the
Emperor’s desire to strike the imagination of the people and cause
them to believe that the gods had had enough of victims. He must have
abhorred such cruelty, but he was too weak to resist the clamour of the
priests and mob of Rome as Pilate had been in presence of other priests
and another mob. Interpret his conduct as we will, mere natural virtue
and the maxims of the philosophers show ill beside the folly of the
Cross. Children and a weak woman put to shame this paragon of virtues;
but, if they did so, the glory was not theirs but Christ’s; it was His
love that nerved them to brave the lash, the bludgeon and the axe; He
Who bade them be His witnesses to the ends of the earth, was in them,
and suffered for them, because they suffered for Him. It is mockery and
sophistry to think that such strength could come from frail humanity.
* * * * *
St. Felicitas and her sons fell victims to the prejudices of the
priests and the mob. The martyrdom of St. Justin and his companions
was due to another force that was strongly to resist the advance of
Christianity--namely, the opposition of the philosophers. The priests
and the mob hated the Christians for the contempt with which they
treated the State religion. The philosophers had an additional motive
for hatred in their jealousy of the influence of the new teachers. “You
see we profit nothing: the whole world is gone after Him.”
St. Justin, like many of the great Christian apologists, had come to
the Church through the Greek schools. He had searched for truth in
all the beaten paths of Greek philosophy and found it not. “Nobody
had such faith in Socrates as to die for his doctrines,” he tells us;
and it was the eloquence of the martyrs’ sufferings which converted
him. The voice of Christ said “Come,” and the heart of the pagan said
“Come, Lord Jesus.” He became a Christian and devoted to the cause of
making Christ known the whole ardour of heart and intellect with which
he had sought and found Him. This Christian Socrates would walk in his
philosopher’s dress, which he still retained, through the public places
of the city--the porches of the temples, the colonnades, and porticoes
and baths, where the _élite_ of Rome used to lounge each day discussing
the latest society scandal, the news from the provinces, the elections
or the games, and in these places he would converse and dispute with
all comers. He had in this way inflicted severe humiliations on many of
the pagan philosophers, who went about denouncing the Christians, and
earned their thorough hatred. One especially was bitter against him.
This was Crescens, a Cynic, whom Justin long expected would denounce
him and who did so at length.
Justin and six of his disciples were arrested and brought before the
Prefect of the City, Junius Rusticus, the Emperor’s most trusted and
intimate friend. The dialogue between these two men, both trained
in the Greek schools of philosophy but now completely alienated, is
typical of the conflict between old and new which marks the age of the
Antonines.
“To begin,” said the Prefect, “obey the gods and do what the Emperors
command.” Justin replied: “We cannot be accused or blamed for obeying
the precepts of Our Saviour Jesus Christ.” “What doctrines do you
profess?” “I have studied all doctrines in turn and have settled in
that of the Christians, although it is disliked by the advocates
of error.” “What dogma is that?” “The doctrine which we Christians
devotedly follow, the only true doctrine, is the belief in one only
God, Creator of all things, visible and invisible, and the confession
of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Whom also the prophets announced,
Who is to judge the race of man, the Herald of Salvation, and the
Teacher of all those who have good-will to be taught by Him. And I
consider myself, being but man, incapable of speaking worthily of His
Infinite Deity. That is the work of the prophets. They for centuries,
inspired from on high, announced the coming amongst men of Him Whom
I have said is the Son of God.” Here was a revelation to the devotee
of Epictetus, one of the best of pagans; but he paid no heed. “Where
do you Christians meet?” he asked. “The God of the Christians is not
confined to any place; He fills Heaven and earth with His invisible
presence; in every place the faithful adore and praise Him.” “You
are then a Christian?” “Yes, I am a Christian.” Turning to Justin’s
companions he asked the same question and got the same reply. To the
slave Euelpistus, he said: “And you, what are you?” “I am a slave of
Cæsar, but also a Christian, and I have got my freedom from Christ; by
His goodness, through His grace, I have one hope with these.”
Here for the first time was realised the equality of man in its truest
sense. Rusticus might well have recalled the words of his master
Epictetus: “The slave, like you, derives his origin from Jupiter
himself; he is his son like you; he is born of the same divine seed.”
But he gave no token of sympathy. The winged word of Euelpistus: “a
slave of Cæsar but a freedman of Christ” passed like an arrow through
his mind and left not a trace of its passage.
Turning again to Justin he said: “Listen to me, you who are called
learned, and think that you have the true doctrine; if I get you
scourged and beheaded, think you that you must needs go up to Heaven?”
“I hope,” answered Justin, “to receive the reward destined for those
who keep the commandments of Christ, if I suffer the tortures you
promise me. For I know that those who have lived thus will keep the
Divine favour to the end of the world.” “You think, then, that you will
mount up to Heaven, there to receive your reward,” said the judge with
a sneer. “I do not think it, I know it, I am certain of it without a
doubt.” This assurance of a future life of happiness fell strangely
on the ears of the Stoic philosopher. His heart craved for it but at
best he could hope for immortality only, “if it were best for the whole
Kosmos that it should be so.” He gave his final command to sacrifice to
the idols and received a final refusal; and all were immediately sent
to execution.
* * * * *
More famous than either the martyrdom of St. Felicitas or of St. Justin
was the martyrdom at Lyons of forty-eight Christians, afterwards known
as the martyrdom of the Maccabees. It is typical of the persecutions in
the provinces as the others were of those in Rome, and fortunately we
still possess the beautiful letter of the churches of Lyons and Vienne
to the churches of Asia which gives a full account of it. It took place
in A.D. 177, when Marcus Aurelius had already reigned for sixteen years
and within three years of his death. He was then grappling with the
barbarians on the Danube frontier and the plague was working havoc in
the provinces as in Rome and Italy. Superstition broke out on all sides
with renewed force and with especial intensity at Lyons, the religious
capital of the Three Gauls. The old calumnies against the Christians
were revived. They were accused of infanticide and incest, of treachery
to the State, of secret conspiracy, and of contempt for the gods and
hatred of mankind. To them was due the anger of the gods; and by their
blood alone could it be satiated.
The persecution began by a social ostracism of the Christians from all
intercourse with their fellow-citizens in the baths, the forum and the
other public places of the city, and even in private houses. If they
violated this order they were beaten and stoned in the streets. So
violent did this persecution become that the magistrates had at last to
arrest all known to be Christians and examine them before the people.
All confessed to the faith and were thrown into prison to await the
arrival of the Imperial legate.
Immediately on his arrival the formal trial began. By a strange
travesty of justice the prisoners were first cruelly tortured. Stirred
by this a young nobleman, Vettius Epagathus, stood out from the crowd
and demanded to be allowed to plead their cause. He was already a
Christian of ascetic life and loved by his brethren as “a gracious
disciple of Christ following the Lamb whithersoever He went.” “Are
you a Christian?” the legate asked him. “I am a Christian,” in his
boldest tones. He was immediately put amongst the accused. “Behold the
Christian’s advocate,” jeered the judge.
In this trial ten of the accused, weaker and worse prepared than the
rest, denied Christ. This was a matter of far keener anguish to the
faithful than their own sufferings. But the ranks thus broken were
soon filled up by others, amongst them their aged Bishop, Pothinus.
Meanwhile the slaves of Christian masters had been arrested, and
tortured and bribed into swearing to all the current charges. Their
evidence lashed the mob to still greater fury. No torture was now to be
spared. A second time the Christians were placed at the gentle mercies
of the torturers; this repetition of the torture in such cases having
been legalised by Marcus. But nothing could break the spirit of these
warriors; they rejoiced to be accounted worthy to suffer something for
Him they loved. How intense was the nerving power of love in the souls
of Sanctus the deacon and the slave-girl Blandina!
Sanctus when questioned again and again did but answer: “I am a
Christian.” Even when the white-hot plates of brass were applied to his
body and his flesh hissed and seared beneath them, in all his agony,
his one relief was to proclaim again and again: “I am a Christian.”
“Bathed and refreshed,” his brethren tell us, “in the heavenly
well of living water which flows from the breasts of Christ,” every
fresh torture was to him “a refreshment and a remedy rather than a
punishment.”
But his courage was as nothing to that of Blandina. She was the
bravest of the brave in the bravest of all armies--the “witnesses” of
Christ. Her mistress and her fellow-Christians dreaded lest from her
frail, sensitive frame she should give way, as ten stronger had done
before. They misjudged, however, the power of love; the right hand
of the Lord wrought strength in her. She had no words of surrender,
no cry for mercy. From morning till evening she wearied out several
sets of torturers, who retired baffled and amazed that she still
lived. “I am a Christian and we do nothing wrong,” was her cry again
and again amidst her pains; and fresh and fresh with each repetition
came new strength and courage. Renan rightly says of her: “As to the
maid-servant Blandina, she proved that a revolution had been achieved.
The true emancipation of the slave, emancipation by heroism, was in
great measure her work. The pagan slave was supposed to be essentially
wicked and immoral. What better way to rehabilitate and free him than
to show him capable of the same virtues, the same sacrifices, as the
freeman? How were these women to be treated with disdain, who had
been seen acting with even more sublime heroism than their mistresses
in the amphitheatre? The good Lyonese maid-servant had heard it said
that the judgments of God are the overthrow of human appearances, and
that God is often pleased to choose that which is humblest, ugliest,
and most despised to confound that which seems beautiful and strong.
Inspired by her rôle she called for the torture and burned with
eagerness to suffer.” It is the glory of Christianity to have raised
the off-scourings of mankind to such sublimity. Galen acknowledged
that the conduct of the ordinary Christian was as noble as that of
the most enlightened of the philosophers. He wrote as one who had
been a contemporary of Epictetus and physician to Marcus Aurelius and
intimate with the best lives which paganism produced. We who read the
lives of the martyrs whole and appreciate the motives of their heroism
know that it is an irreverence to compare with their virtue the virtue
even of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Yet it is well to have this
testimony of an enlightened pagan contemporary to the elevating power
of Christianity on the masses.
The final execution was spread over several days. The legate made the
occasion a public holiday; and delegates from all Gaul, then present
at Lyons for administrative and religious purposes, witnessed the
spectacle.
Maturus, Sanctus, Attalus and Blandina were chosen to provide the first
day’s entertainment. Their tortures, we are told, saved the town the
expense of a gladiatorial show. Christians were more novel game and
cheaper than hired soldiers, lions and panthers. Blandina was bound all
but naked to a pole at the end of the amphitheatre. She was to be at
the mercy of the beasts; and the beasts proved more merciful than the
yelling savage mob, who crowded tier over tier all around. That day
none of them would touch the frail, delicate form that, bound as it
was, recalled to the martyrs another form bound too by the Romans on a
hill outside Jerusalem. She was reserved for another day, and meanwhile
her fortitude gave courage to all.
Attalus was a Roman citizen well-known to the people. Hence they called
for his torture as for a favourite actor or gladiator. He was forced to
walk round the amphitheatre amid the jeers of the spectators, preceded
by a placard with the motto “This is Attalus, the Christian.” But the
rights of a Roman citizen were not to be outraged with impunity; and
so the legate sent Attalus back to prison without torture, there to
await the Emperor’s orders.
No such rights protected Maturus and Sanctus; their bodies were already
each a mass of wounds from their former tortures; and they would be
well spent in making a people’s holiday. A file of roughs lashed their
naked, lacerated bodies as they passed into the arena. Their eyes fell
on the instruments of torture--a gruesome array--along the centre; and
then the awful moment came. A sullen growl and a roar from the farther
end, and already the beasts were upon them. A thrill of mad excitement
ran through the throng above. The beasts sank their teeth in the
Christians’ flesh and lapped the Christians’ blood, and many a pagan
envied them the feast. But, sure of their prey, they did not devour
them at once; they tossed them to and fro in cruel sport and left them
for the time. The mob were impatient; they wanted death; and called for
the red-hot iron chair. Into this the martyrs were placed and the foul
smell of the burnt flesh was incense to the nostrils of the holiday
makers. But the Christians would not recant; the beasts would have no
more of them; and it was slow sport watching this roasting process;
so at a signal from the mob they received the _coup de grace_, the
_finale_ of all the people’s pleasures.
Here as ever persecution did but beget fresh victims. The whole
Christian population was aflame with desire to confess Christ; and even
transgressed the wise rule of the Church, which forbade them to seek
imprisonment. But in this moment of spiritual intensity discretion
were out of place; who can blame them for not standing meekly by when
their brethren were writhing in torture and the name of Christ was
being blasphemed? They can well afford to concede superiority in this
always somewhat suspicious virtue of discretion to their arm-chair
critics; they will have enough left to secure for themselves Heaven and
the homage of mankind. The number of the accused increased day by day,
especially the number of Roman citizens. This alarmed the legate, and
he sent for instructions to the Emperor. After some weeks the reply
came: those who recanted were to be released, the obstinate were to be
put to death with torture. After all allowance has been made for the
circumstances of the time and his own inevitable ignorance, this act
remains a dark stain on the Stoic saint.
The last act of this long-drawn tragedy at last began. A final inquiry
was held by the legate, this time chiefly in order to discriminate the
Roman citizens from the non-citizens. The latter were to receive the
full measure of torture; the former were to be beheaded outright--all
except Attalus, who was reserved for the arena as a favour to the mob.
In this last trial despite promises and threats not one, even of those
who had before fallen, wavered. The executions continued for several
days, owing to the great numbers of the martyrs. Each day from early
morning the pagans thronged the amphitheatre. Attalus and Alexander
were the next victims. They went through the whole gamut of pain
without a word or a groan, their souls wrapped in prayer the while.
Finally they were finished off by the sword when the mob tired of them.
Blandina and Ponticus were subjected again to yet fiercer torments,
ending in death--torments so cruel that the Gauls said one to another:
“Never in our country has woman endured so much.”
The whole proceedings are a terrible commentary on the rule of the
philosopher-king and Gibbon’s picture of the Golden Age, “the happiest
period of the world’s history, when the good of the subject was the
one object of government.” Much may be admitted to palliate Marcus’
connivance, but assuredly he cannot be wholly excused. We can acquit
him of monstrous brutality; but only at the cost of attributing to him
narrow prejudice or pusillanimity. We can save his heart, but only at
the expense of his intellect and will.
I have dwelt on a few of the many martyrdoms of his reign to show the
conduct and the ideals of Christianity side by side with the conduct
of the pagan philosophers. What reasonable being can read aright the
story of this struggle and yet prefer the cold, negative, ineffectual
ideals of Marcus and his friends to the warm throbbing life of love and
the heroic death of Ponticus and Blandina, of Justin and Felicitas?
Yet, if we are to believe Renan and Arnold, the Meditations of Marcus
are the force which will transform the world when, to quote Renan,
the Gospel and the _Imitation of Christ_ have passed away, and on the
hillside of Lyons where the martyrs died “a temple shall rise to the
Supreme Amnesty and contain a chapel for all causes, all virtues, all
martyrs.” Surely this is dilettanteism and paradox run wild, as untrue
to psychology as it is to history and all sane and effective religion!
CHAPTER X
THE PAGAN À KEMPIS
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius have often been compared with the
_Imitation of Christ_. The comparison is interesting; and the analysis
which it involves of one of the noblest and purest of pagan ascetics
on the one hand, and of the great exponent of Christian asceticism
on the other, cannot but strengthen belief in the divine origin of
Christianity. Unfortunately, we cannot attempt anything like a complete
analysis of the two books; and we must be content to call attention to
a few points of resemblance and difference in the two ascetics; and
estimate their respective values as salves to wounded souls.
The appraisers of “disinterested” and “undogmatic” morality have
professed to find in the pagan book a surer guide to life. They find it
more human, less scholastic, freer and fresher. Renan has voiced this
view with his usual brilliance and fickle impressionism.
It is true of course that the _Imitation of Christ_ is built on
Christian dogma and steeped in Christian mysticism. But this is not
matter of discredit to the _Imitation_ but of glory to Christianity.
It is because the martyrs were strengthened by Christian dogmas and
ideals that they alone surpassed Aurelius in that age. There is far
less of rigid adherence to the letter of formulæ and infinitely more of
spirit, of unction, of personal devotion in the _Imitation_. If dogma
did not hinder but rather inspired a book which gives such freedom
to the spirit, it is time to revise some of the current cant about
the sterility of theology, its fettering of the spirit, and the witty
definition of dogmatism as “puppyism grown big.”
Those who have embraced Christianity and walked its peaceful paths
can have no doubt as to the superiority of the _Imitation_ in all
that is beautiful, good and true. But even positivists, professing
completely to reject the supernatural, find in à Kempis a unique charm.
George Eliot, the best of them, has told us in inspired words what the
_Imitation_ was to her:--
“I suppose that is the reason why the small, old-fashioned book, for
which you need only pay sixpence at a bookstall, works miracles to this
day, turning bitter waters into sweetness; while expensive sermons
and treatises newly issued leave all things as they were before. It
was written down by a hand that waited for the heart’s prompting; it
is the chronicle of a solitary hidden anguish, struggle, trust and
triumph--not written on velvet cushions to teach endurance to those who
are treading with bleeding feet on the stones. And so it remains at
all times a lasting record of human needs and human consolations; the
voice of a brother, who, ages ago, felt and suffered and renounced--in
the cloister, perhaps, with serge gown and tonsured head, with much
chanting and long fasts, and with a fashion of speech different from
ours--but under the same silent far-off heavens, and with the same
passionate desires, the same strivings, the same failures, the same
weariness.”
This is the opinion of one who has deprived the _Imitation_ of its
supernatural element. And even from the purely natural point of view,
what more beautiful than the teachings of à Kempis on the true conduct
of life? But this is not its characteristic charm, and one suspects
that it is not the purely natural element in à Kempis that fascinates
the positivist humanitarians; it is the supernatural element; and the
attraction is but the strong cry of their spiritual nature revolting
against the materialism to which their “positive” tenets lead; just
as that same need for a religion led the best of them, even at the
cost of inconsistency, to establish with much ritual and fantastic
aberrations the cult of Humanity.
But there is no need to settle the question between the two books
by authority. Were it necessary to do so, one need but recall the
multitudes of all classes and creeds, from St. Francis Xavier and
St. Ignatius to Leibnitz and Bossuet and thence to Wesley, George
Eliot, Gladstone, and Gordon, for whom the _Imitation_ has been a
shining light and a guide upon their path second only to the Sacred
Books themselves. To join that number one has but to take and read.
The points of similarity between the two books consist in many maxims
common to both, such as “that we ought not to regard the opinion of
men”; “that we ought to keep the passions in restraint”; “that we ought
to despise pleasures and endure hardship with patience”; “that we are
not to be too much attached to life and to earthly things”; “that we
ought to bear with the faults of others and return good for evil.” This
similarity is, however, to a great extent merely verbal. The same words
do not express the same spiritual attitude in the two writers. It is
merely the resemblance which prevails between all the great ascetical
writers, from Seneca and Epictetus to St. Francis, St. Ignatius and
Bunyan, and thence to modern writers such as William James. They all
study by introspection the same human soul with the same natural
faculties and tendencies, strength and weakness, in all its varying
moods of joy and sadness, perplexity and peace. Whereas the differences
are measured only by the distance between the natural and the
supernatural and show themselves in the whole spirit and atmosphere,
tone and motive, of the two books.
I have already hinted in passing at the sympathy there is between à
Kempis and Marcus Aurelius in their contempt of sophistry and vain
learning. But this similarity of view does but bring out all the more
strikingly the difference in motive and the manifest superiority of
the Christian. Aurelius was glad that he had not made more proficiency
in the rhetorical and sophistical training of the day; and for the
praiseworthy motive that thus he might have more leisure to attend to
the main work of life--his own perfection. But how cold is his analysis
beside the glowing words of à Kempis. The pagan seeks leisure for an
introspection too often morbid; the Christian wishes for silence of the
schools that God Himself may speak within him, and in the ecstasy of
this holy discipleship cries out:--
“Happy is he whom Truth teacheth by itself, not by figures and words
that pass, but as it is in itself.... It is a great folly for us to
neglect things profitable and necessary and willingly to busy ourselves
about those which are curious and hurtful.... He to whom the Eternal
Word speaketh is set at liberty from a multitude of opinions.... O
Truth, my God, make me one with Thee in everlasting love. I am wearied
with often reading and hearing many things; in Thee is all that I will
or desire. Let all teachers hold their peace; let all creatures be
silent in Thy sight; speak Thou alone to me.”
In passing, we may compare this prayer and the whole mystic rapture
and personal heart-cries of the _Imitation_ with Aurelius’ idea of
a perfect prayer: “A prayer of the Athenians: Rain, rain, O dear
Zeus, down on the ploughed fields of the Athenians and on the plains.
In truth we ought not to pray at all or we ought to pray in this
simple and noble fashion.” This simplicity was a great advance on the
hypocrisy and verbiage which often marked Roman prayers and provided
matter for satire to Horace and Juvenal; but, after all, it does not
present us with any very lofty ideal. So, too, when he speaks of the
objects which we ought to pray for: “Why dost thou not ask that the
gods may give thee the faculty of not fearing any of the things thou
fearest, or of not desiring any of the things thou desirest, or not
being pained at anything rather than pray that any of these things
should not happen or happen? One man prays thus: How shall I not lose
my little son? Do thou pray thus: How shall I not be afraid to lose
him. In fine, turn thy prayers this way, and see what comes.” All this
does Aurelius credit, but it is far from the outpouring of the soul to
God, which is the essence of the Christian book.
Both books teach that peace must come through strife--strife without
and strife within. The Stoic like the Christian teaches that life is
a warfare; that safety lies in continual vigilance; in restraint over
our lower nature; in retirement and self-examination; in regarding all
the things of time as of no account in themselves. “Look within,” says
Aurelius, “within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up,
if thou wilt ever dig”; “the mind maintains its own tranquillity by
retiring into itself”; “retire into thyself. The rational principle
which rules has this nature, that it is content with itself when it
does what is just and so secures tranquillity”; “the mind which is free
from passions is a citadel, for man has nothing more secure to which
he can fly for refuge and for the future be inexpugnable.” À Kempis
also bids us “seek a proper time to retire into thyself” but this
retirement is not into solitude; it is to the most sublime communion:
“Shut the door upon thyself and call to thee Jesus thy beloved. Stay
with Him in thy cell, for thou shalt not find so great peace anywhere
else”; for “whosoever aims at arriving at internal and spiritual things
must with Jesus go aside from the crowd”; “in silence and quiet the
devout soul goes forward and learns the secrets of the Scriptures”;
“for God, with His holy angels, will draw nigh to Him who withdraws
himself from his acquaintances and friends.”
The ideal of à Kempis is by subjection of the passions to reach the
interior freedom which begets all the Christian virtues until these in
turn are concentrated into one strong glow of love by which the lover
is united to his Beloved, heart to heart, and soul to soul. It is
this love which makes his short sentences quiver and glow and pierce,
especially in the beautiful chapter on the effects of Divine love,
where he prays that he may cast off the human and put on God:--
“Free me from evil passions and heal my mind of all disorderly
affections, that being healed and well purified in my interior I may
become fit to love, courageous to suffer, and constant to persevere.
Love is an excellent thing, a great good indeed, which alone maketh
light all that is burthensome and beareth with even mind all that
is unequal.... The love of Jesus is noble and it spurreth us on to
do great things and exciteth us to desire always that which is most
perfect.... Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing stronger, nothing
higher, nothing broader, nothing more pleasant, nothing more generous,
nothing fuller, or better in heaven or earth; for love is from God and
cannot rise but in God, above all things created.”
It is scarcely necessary to say that the Stoic had no such ideal as
this; for it is essentially a Christian ideal.
À Kempis soars on the wings of love through the spirit world at home
amongst the angels; while the Stoic trudges drearily along the hard,
bleak road of logic; and once more logic is convicted of futility
as a complete guide to life. Follow reason, said the Stoic: reason
tells you that you can guide your own destinies and mould your own
inner life: rely on yourself, since you can rely on nobody else: be
self-sufficient. This self-sufficiency was the parent of hardness and
at times of an unlovely spiritual pride. Aurelius seems to thank God
that he is not as the rest of men; he is better than the pharisee
only in that he pities the publican and acknowledges that he himself
has that within him which could lead him to lower depths did he cease
to follow the Stoic ascesis; but his pity has frequently something
of spiritual disdain and contempt in it. Yet he is not wholly proud;
there is in him a certain modesty and self-suppression which often in
its expression reminds us of sayings of à Kempis; but he never learnt
to think: “We are all frail; but do thou think no one more frail
than thyself.” “If thou wouldst know and learn anything useful, love
to be unknown and esteemed as nothing; this is the highest and most
profitable lesson, truly to know and despise oneself”; or with St.
Paul “who is weak and I am not weak.” But we should not expect unaided
reason to reach these heights. À Kempis himself tells us that light
comes to the soul only when reason is transcended by faith and love:
“If thou reliest more upon thine own reason or industry than upon the
virtue that subjects to Jesus Christ, thou wilt seldom and hardly be an
enlightened man; for God will have us perfectly subject to Himself, and
to transcend all reason by ardent love.” “Reason transcended by ardent
love”: in this is expressed the whole relation between Christianity
and all systems that rely on reason alone. The soul itself in all its
aspirations is, as Tertullian said, naturally Christian, and it is only
by a Procrustean torture that it can be forced into any other system.
The inadequacy of Aurelius’ teaching is brought out most clearly in the
shallow optimism with which he tries to conjure away all the sufferings
of life. Nothing can be more unreal than his attitude towards evil. We
turn to à Kempis and at once we are struck by the contrast. Suffering
and evil are for à Kempis an intense reality. He does not attempt to
waive them away with the magic formula “Never mind.” No; it is because
they are realities, often terrible realities, that they are the most
precious things in life with the power to transmute the human into
the Divine. He recognises that no ordinary motive can reconcile frail
humanity to the trials of life; that many are ready to follow Jesus to
the breaking of bread but few to the drinking of the chalice of His
passion; that only an ardent personal love and loyalty to Christ can
induce men to take up their cross and follow Him, Who has gone before
bearing His cross. When suffering is borne in this spirit it loses the
unreasonableness which besets all other explanations of it. It becomes
the greatest of blessings; it makes us indeed like unto God.
How ineffectual beside this spirit of suffering for love are the cold
formularies with which, as by magic spells, the Stoic would benumb
human pain. Take for instance the much-quoted passage from the end of
the second book: “Of human life the duration is a point; the substance
is fleeting; the perception is dull; and the fabric of the whole body
subject to rottenness; the soul is an idle whirling and fortune hard to
divine, and fame a thing devoid of judgment. In short, all that there
is of the body is a stream and all that there is of the soul a dream
and a vapour. Life is a warfare and a sojourning in a strange country,
and after-fame is oblivion. What then is that which can conduct a man?
One thing, and only one, philosophy.” But he himself found, as many
have found, that sorrow is not banished nor the riddle of life solved
by philosophy.
Thus we see the spirit of these two teachers of men. Further comparison
would but illustrate more clearly that the Christian book, because it
is in a sense divine, is intensely human, adequate to fulfil all that
is best in man; while the pagan book, because it is merely human, does
not satisfy the human soul, which always seeks for something better
than itself. The one is centred in God and draws its inspiration from
the inspired books themselves, concentrating all its efforts on the
reproduction of Christ in the Christian. The other, though it bids
us to “love man and follow God,” means something quite different by
this love of man and this following of whatever its author understood
by “God.” For it is essentially centred in man, in self; and has
no inspiration but the gropings of the unaided intellect. Nor can
it propose to us any higher model for our imitation than the blind
subjection to law which prevails in the inanimate and organic universe;
the stones, a fig-tree, or the brutes. It is true that in the spirit of
the Meditations there is something akin to the sayings of à Kempis; but
the Christian time and again feels in the pagan book the sense of void,
the vain strivings after ideals--ideals fully realised and expressed by
the lowly brother of the Common Life. The humblest Christian has as his
birthright truths which were the fruit of years of training and much
struggle in the noble pagan soul; and he has more.
THE END
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