37
A Good Emperor and a Bad Son
Haveyou ever said, “I don’t care,” when you really did care?
I have. Every one has.
Perhaps you have been naughty and have been told you could have no dessert or must go to bed early, and you tossed your head and said, “I don’t care.”
Well, once upon a time there was a society or club formed of grown-up people who said they weren’t ever going to care what happened to them; whether it was good or whether it was bad would make no difference. I should call them the “Don’t Care Club,” but they called themselves “Stoics,” and they thought the way to be good was “not to care.”
If a Stoic’s house burned down, he would say to himself and try to make himself believe, “I don’t care; it doesn’t matter.”
If some one gave him a million dollars, he would say, “I don’t care; it doesn’t matter.”
If he was told by the doctor he was going to die next week, he would say, “I don’t care; it doesn’t matter.”
This Society of Stoics was started by a Greek philosopher named Zeno.
Zeno lived in Athens later than those philosophers, Socrates and Plato, whom you have already heard about. Zeno said that the only way to be good and the only way to be happy was not to care for pleasure and not to mind pain or suffering but calmly to put up with everything, no matter how unpleasant or disagreeable it was, and the Stoics believed him. Even to-day people who bear troubles and pain and hardships without a murmur are called stoics.
One of the chief members of the society was a Roman emperor.
Rome’s worst emperor, Nero, had been dead a hundred years when there came to the throne this new emperor, who was just as good as Nero was bad. This emperor was named Marcus Aurelius. Although he was so very good and pious, he was not a Christian. Indeed, Marcus Aurelius treated the Christians terribly, as they had been treated terribly by the previous emperors, for he thought them traitors to the empire.
At this time most of the Romans had very little religion of any sort. They were not Christians, but neither did they put much faith in their own gods, Jupiter and Juno and the rest. They honored them because they were brought up to honor them and because they thought if theydidn’t honor them they might have bad luck, so they took no chances. But instead of believing in such gods, people usually believed in the teachings of some wise man or philosopher and obeyed more or less the rules he made. Zeno was one of these philosophers, and the Stoics were the members of this society.
Although Marcus Aurelius was an emperor, he would rather have been a Stoic philosopher or a priest. Although he had to be a soldier and a general, he would rather have been a writer. When he was off, fighting with his army, he carried his writing-materials with him, and he would go to his tent at night and write out his thoughts. These thoughts he called his “Meditations.” Here is one of the things he wrote:
When you find you do not want to get up early in the morning, make this short speech to yourself. I am getting up now to do the business of a man. Was I made to do nothing but doze and keep warm under the covers?
When you find you do not want to get up early in the morning, make this short speech to yourself. I am getting up now to do the business of a man. Was I made to do nothing but doze and keep warm under the covers?
That was written long years ago, yet your father might have told you the same thing this morning.
People read this book of Marcus Aurelius to-day, either in the Greek in which it was written or translated into English.
A great many of Marcus Aurelius’ sayings seem almost as if they might have been in the Bible. Indeed, some people keep his book by their bedside as if it were a Bible.
One of his rules was, “Forgive your enemies,” and he seemed almost glad to have enemies so that he might have a chance to forgive them. Indeed, he took such a special delight in forgiving his enemies that he even went out of his way to do so. Though Marcus Aurelius was not a Christian, nevertheless he was more Christian in the way he acted than some of the later emperors who were supposed to be Christians.
But like many people who are very good themselves, Marcus Aurelius was unable to bring up his son to be so. His son was named Commodus, and Commodus was just as bad as his father was good. He may have been bored when a child by too many of his father’s instructions, for when he grew up and was able to choose for himself and do as he pleased, instead of following Zeno and joining the Stoics, he joined the society of another philosopher called Epicurus.
Epicurus had lived about the same time as Zeno. But he had taught what at first seems almost the opposite of what Zeno taught. Epicurus said that the chief end and aim of man and the only good in the world was pleasure;but, said he, the pleasure must be of the right kind. Nowadays people who are very fond of eating nice things, whose whole thought in life is the pleasure of eating, are called “epicures.”
Commodus’s one thought was pleasure, andthe worst kind of pleasure at that. A friend of mine thought Marcus Aurelius was such a fine man that he named his son after him, “Marcus Aurelius Jones,” but when the son grew up he was not at all like his namesake. The name “Commodus” would have suited him much better, for instead of being good and pious, he thought of nothing but pleasure and he was so bad that he ended in jail.
Commodus thought nothing of giving his people a good government; he only thought of giving himself a good time. He was an athlete and had beautiful muscles and a handsome figure, of which he was so proud that he had a statue made of himself. The statue showed him as the strong and muscular god Hercules. Commodus made the people worship him as if he were this god. Just to show off his muscles and his muscular ability, he himself took part in prize-fights—quite bad taste for an emperor. He poisoned or killed any one who found fault with or criticized him. He led a wild and dissipated life, but at last he met the end he deserved. He was strangled to death by a wrestler.
Lycurgus would have said again:
“I told you so.”