The Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius - College of Stoic Philosophers

236 MARCUS AURELIUS
acteristics, in an epoch akin to our own, in a brilliant
centre of civilization. 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.
mediaeval Catholicism, which the man
an atmosphere of
Saint Louis inhabits
of the nineteenth century may admire, indeed, may even
passionately wish to inhabit, but which, strive as he will,
he cannot really inhabit ;
Alfred belongs to a state of
society (I say it with all deference to The Saturday Review
critic who keeps such jealous watch over the honour of
our Saxon ancestors) half barbarous.
Neither Alfred nor
Saint Louis can be morally and intellectually as near to
us as Marcus Aurelius.
The record of the outward life of this admirable man
has in it little of striking incident.
He was born at Rome
on the 26th of April, in the year 121 of the Christian era.
He was nephew and son-in-law to his predecessor on the
throne, Antoninus Pius. When Antoninus died, he was
forty years old, but from the time of his earliest manhood
he had assisted in administering public affairs. Then,
after his uncle s death in 161 for nineteen years he reigned
as emperor. The barbarians were pressing on the
Roman frontier, and a great part of Marcus Aurelius s
nineteen years of reign was passed in campaigning. His
absences from Rome were numerous and long ; we hear
of him in Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Greece ; but, above
all, in the countries on the Danube, where the war with
the barbarians was going on in Austria, Moravia,
Hungary. In these countries much of his Journal seems
to have been written ; parts of it are dated from them ;
and there, a few weeks before his fifty-ninth birthday,
he fell sick and died. The record of him on which his
fame chiefly rests is the record of his inward life his
Journal, or Commentaries, or Meditations, or Thoughts,
for by nil these names has the work been called. Perhaps