Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

iv STOICISM IN HISTORY xci
Mythology is used for poetic machinery and embellish-
ment, but the plot moves at the ordering and disposition
of cosmic destiny. The Fortune or Majesty of Rome
as the visible march
is not so much the work of man,
of God in history, the ordinance and monotone of
Fate. Man is but the acceptant instrument of gods
desine fata deum flecti sperare precando.
In presence of an order too mighty for defiance, too
impersonal for protest, and too august for sympathy,
resolution, and endurance, rather than confidence or
exultation, become the poet's note.
Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito
voices the same profound and tearless acceptance, as
haunts the page of Marcus. Struggle
will attain its
unseen inevitable goal ; that is enough to give dignity
and strength to resignation, but not to animate life
with hope. The most characteristic and immortal of
Vergilian notes such for instance as
or
sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt
tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore
epitomise the mood which dominates the thoughts of
Marcus.
Once genuinely naturalised, the earliest flowers of
a transplanted and imitative literature are likely to
prove the fairest ; they will not possess generative faculty
or reproductive- virtue. It was so with the Graeco-
Roman poetry of the Caesarean and Augustan era.
Its Golden Age is brief and isolated ; and as it subsides
into the silver decadence, Seneca in his Tragedies,