The Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius - College of Stoic Philosophers

238 MARCUS AURELIUS
these notices which he has himself supplied, there are few
of much interest and importance. There is the fine
anecdote of his speech when he heard of the assassination
of the revolted Avidius Cassius, against whom he was
marching he was ; sorry, he said, to be deprived of the
pleasure of pardoning him. And there are one or two
more anecdotes of him which show the same spirit.
But
the great record for the outward life of a man who has
left
such a record of his lofty inward aspirations as that
which Marcus Aurelius has left, is the clear consenting
voice of all his contemporaries high and low, friend
and enemy, pagan and Christian in praise of his sin
cerity, justice, and goodness. The world s charity does
not err on the side of excess, and here was a man occupying
the most conspicuous station in the world, and professing
the highest possible standard of conduct ; yet the world
was obliged to declare that he walked worthily of his
profession. Long after his death, his bust was to be
seen in the houses of private men through the wide
Roman empire it
; may be the vulgar part of human
nature which busies itself with the semblance and doings
of living sovereigns, it is its nobler part which busies
itself with those of the dead ;
these busts of Marcus
Aurelius, in the homes of Gaul, Britain, and Italy, bore
witness, not to the inmates frivolous curiosity about
princes and palaces, but to their reverential memory of
the passage of a great man upon the earth.
Two things, however, before one turns from the outward
to the inward life of Marcus Aurelius, force themselves
upon one s notice, and demand a word of comment ;
he
persecuted the Christians, and he had for his son the
vicious and brutal Commodus. The persecution at Lyons,
in which Attalus and Pothinus suffered, the persecution
at Smyrna in which Polycarp suffered,
took place in his
reign. Of his humanity, of his tolerance, of his horror
of cruelty and violence, of his wish to refrain from severe