On the death of Hadrian in A. D. 138, Antoninus Pius succeeded to the throne, and, in accordance with the late Emperor's conditions, adopted Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Commodus. Marcus had been betrothed at the age of fifteen to the sister of Lucius Commodus, but the new Emperor broke off the engagement, and betrothed him instead to his daughter Faustina. The marriage, however, was not celebrated till seven years afterwards, A.D. 146.
The long reign of Antoninus Pius is one of those happy periods that have no history. An almost unbroken peace reigned at home and abroad. Taxes were lightened, calamities relieved, informers discouraged; confiscation were rare, plots and executions were almost unknown. Throughout the whole extent of his vast domain the people loved and valued their Emperor, and the Emperor's one aim was to further, the happiness of his people. He, too, like Aurelius, had learnt that what was good for the bee was good for the hive. He strove to live as the civil administrator, of an unaggressive and united republic; he disliked war, did not value the military title of Imperator, and never deigned to accept a triumph.
With this wise and eminent prince, who was as amiable in his private relations as he was admirable in the discharge of his public duties, Marcus Aurelius spent the next twenty-three years of his life. So close and intimate was their union, so completely did they regard each other as father and son, that during all that period Aurelius never slept more than twice away from the house of Antoninus. There was not a shade of jealousy between them; each was the friend and adviser of the other, and, so far from regarding his destined heir with suspicion, the Emperor gave him the designation "Caesar," and heaped upon him all the honours of the Roman Commonwealth. It was in vain that the whisper of malignant tongues attempted to shake this mutual confidence. Antoninus once saw the mother of Aurelius in earnest prayer before the statue of Apollo. "What do you think she is praying for so intently?" asked a wretched mischief-maker of the name of Valerius Omulus: "it is that you may die, and her son reign." This wicked suggestion might have driven a prince of meaner character into violence and disgust, but Antoninus passed it over with the silence of contempt.
It was the main delight of Antoninus to enjoy the quiet of his country villa. Unlike Hadrian, who traversed immense regions of his vast dominion, Antoninus lived entirely either at Rome, or in his beautiful villa at Lorium, a little seacoast village about twelve miles from the capital. In this villa he had been born, and here he died, surrounded by the reminiscences of his childhood. In this his real home it was his special pleasure to lay aside the pomp and burden of his imperial rank. "He did not," says Marcus, "take the bath at unseasonable hours; he was not fond of building houses, nor curious about what he eat, nor about the texture and colour of his clothes, nor about the beauty of his slaves." Even the dress he wore was the work of the provincial artist in his little native place. So far from checking the philosophic tastes of his adopted son he fostered them, and sent for Apollonius of Chalcis to be his teacher in the doctrines of Stoicism. In one of his notes to Fronto, Marcus draws the picture of their simple country occupations and amusements. Hunting, fishing, boxing, wrestling, occupied the leisure of the two princes, and they shared the rustic festivities of the vintage. "I have dined," he writes, "on a little bread.... We perspired a great deal, shouted a great deal, and left some gleanings of the vintage hanging on the trellis work.... When I got home I studied a little, but not to much advantage I had a long talk with my mother, who was lying on her couch." Who knows how much Aurelius and how much the world may have gained from such conversation as this with a mother from whom he had learnt to hate even the thought of evil? Nor will any one despise the simplicity of heart which made him mingle with the peasants as an amateur vintager, unless he is so tasteless and so morose as to think with scorn of Scipio and Laelius as they gathered shells on the seashore, or of Henry IV. as he played at horses with his little boys on all-fours. The capability of unbending thus, the genuine cheerfulness which enters at due times into simple amusements, has been found not rarely in the highest and purest minds.
For many years no incident of importance broke the even tenor of Aurelius's life. He lived peaceful, happy, prosperous, and beloved, watching without envy the increasing years of his adopted father. But in the year 161, when Marcus was now forty years old, Antoninus Pius, who had reached the age of seventy-five, caught a fever at Lorium. Feeling that his end was near, he summoned his friends and the chief men of Rome to his bedside, and there (without saying a word about his other adopted son, who is generally known by the name of Lucius Verus) solemnly recommended Marcus to them as his successor; and then, giving to the captain of the guard the watchword of "Equanimity," as though his earthly task was over he ordered to be transferred to the bedroom of Marcus the little golden statue of Fortune, which was kept in the private chamber of the Emperors as an omen of public prosperity.
The very first public act of the new Emperor was one of splendid generosity, namely, the admission of his adoptive brother Lucius Verus into the fullest participation of imperial honours, the Tribunitian and proconsular powers, and the titles Caesar and Augustus. The admission of Lucius Verus to a share of the empire was due to the innate modesty of Marcus. As he was a devoted student, and cared less for manly exercises, in which Verus excelled, he thought that his adoptive brother would be a better and more useful general than himself, and that he could best serve the State by retaining the civil administration, and entrusting to his brother the management of war. Verus, however, as soon as he got away from the immediate influence and ennobling society of Marcus, broke loose from all decency, and showed himself to be a weak and worthless personage, as unfit for war as he was for all the nobler duties of peace, and capable of nothing but enormous gluttony and disgraceful self-indulence. Two things only can be said in his favour; the one, that, though depraved, he was wholly free from cruelty; and the other, that he had the good sense to submit himself entirely to his brother, and to treat him with the gratitude and deference which were his due.
Marcus had a large family by Faustina, and in the first year of his reign his wife bore twins, of whom the one who survived became the wicked and detested Emperor Commodus. As though the birth of such a child were in itself an omen of ruin, a storm of calamity began at once to burst over the long tranquil State. An inundation of the Tiber flung down houses and streets over a great part of Rome, swept away multitudes of cattle, spoiled the harvests, devastated the fields, and caused a distress which ended in wide-spread famine. Men's minds were terrified by earthquakes, by the burning of cities, and by plagues or noxious insects. To these miseries, which the Emperors did their best to alleviate, was added the horrors of wars and rumours of wars. The Partians, under their king Vologeses, defeated and all but destroyed a Roman army, and devastated with impunity the Roman province of Syria. The wild tribes of the Catti burst over Germany with fire and sword; and the news from Britain was full of insurrection and tumult. Such were the elements of trouble and discord which overshadowed the reign of Marcus Aurelius from its very beginning down to its weary close.
As the Partian war was the most important of the three, Verus was sent to quell it, and but for the ability of his generals--the greatest of whom was Avidius Cassius--would have ruined irretrievably the fortunes of the Empire. These generals, however, vindicated the majesty of the Roman name, and Verus returned in triumph, bringing back with him from the East the seeds of a terrible pestilence which devastated the whole Empire and by which, on the outbreak of fresh wars, Verus himself was carried off at Aquileia.
Worthless as he was, Marcus, who in his lifetime had so often pardoned and concealed his faults, paid him the highest honours of sepulcre, and interred his ashes in the mausoleum of Hadrian. There were not wanting some who charged him with the guilt of fratricide, asserting that the death of Verus had been hastened by his means!
I have only one reason for alluding to atrocious and contemptible calumnies like these, and that is because--since no doubt such whispers reached his ears--they help to account for that deep unutterable melancholy which breathes through the little golden book of the Emperor'sMeditations. We find, for instance, among them this isolated fragment:--
"A black character, a womanish character, a stubborn character, bestial, childish, animal, stupid, counterfeit, scurrilous, fraudulent, tyrannical."
We know not of whom he was thinking--perhaps of Nero, perhaps of Caligula, but undoubtedly also of men whom he had seen and known, and whose very existence darkened his soul. The same sad spirit breathes also through the following passages:--
"Soon, very soon, thou wilt be ashes, or a skeleton, and either a name, or not even a name; but name is sound and echo. And the things which are much valued in life are empty, and rotten, and trifling, andlittle dogs biting one another, and little children quarrelling, laughing, and then straightway weeping. But fidelity, and modesty, and justice, and truth are fled
"'Up to Olympus from the wide-spread earth.'"
(v. 33.)
"It would be a man's happiest lot to depart from mankind without having had a taste of lying, and hypocrisy, and luxury, and pride. However tobreathe out one's life when a man has had enough of those thingsis the next best voyage, as the saying is." (ix. 2.)
"Enough of this wretched life, and murmuring, and apish trifles.Why art thou thus disturbed? What is there new in this? What unsettles thee?... Towards the gods, then, now become at last more simple and better." (ix. 37.) The thought is like that which dominates through the Penitential Psalms of David,--that we may take refuge from men, their malignity and their meanness, and find rest for our souls in God. From men David hasnohope; mockery, treachery, injustice, are all that he expects from them,--the bitterness of his enemies, the far-off indifference of his friends. Nor does this greatly trouble him, so long as he does not wholly lose the light ofGod'scountenance. "I had no place to flee unto, and no man cared for my soul. I cried unto thee, O Lord, and said,Thouart my hope, and my portion in the land of the living." "Cast me not away from Thy presence, and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me."
But whatever may have been his impulse at times to give up in despair all attempt to improve the "little breed" of men around him, Marcus had schooled his gentle spirit to live continually in far other feelings. Were men contemptible? It was all the more reason why he should himself be noble. Were men petty, and malignant, and passionate and unjust? In that proportion were they all the more marked out for pity and tenderness, and in that proportion was he bound to the utmost of his ability to show himself great, and forgiving, and calm, and true. Thus Marcus turns his very bitterest experience to gold, and from the vilenesses of others, which depressed his lonely life, so far from suffering himself to be embittered as well as saddened, he only draws fresh lessons of humanity and love.
He says, for instance, "Begin the morning by saying to thyself,I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him that does wrong that is akin to me,... and that it partakes of the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him.For we are made for co-operation,like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; anditis acting against one another to be vexed and turn away." (ii. 1.) Another of his rules, and an eminently wise one, was to fix his thoughts as much as possible on the virtues of others, rather than on their vices. "When thou wishest to delight thyself, think of thevirtuesof those who live with thee--the activity of one, the modesty of another, the liberality of a third, and some other good quality of a fourth." What a rebuke to the contemptuous cynicism which we are daily tempted to display! "An infinite being comes before us," says Robertson, "with a whole eternity wrapt up in his mind and soul, and weproceed to classify him, put a label upon him, as we would upon a jar, saying, This is rice, that is jelly, and this pomatum; and then we think we have saved ourselves the necessity of taking off the cover, How differently our Lord treated the people who came to Him!... consequently, at His touch each one gave out his peculiar spark of light."
Here, again, is a singularly pithy, comprehensive, and beautiful piece of advice:--
"Men exist for the sake of one another.Teach them or bear with them" (viii. 59.)
And again: "The best way of revenging thyself is not to become like the wrong doer."
And again, "If any man has done wrong, the harm is his own. But perhaps he has not done wrong." (ix. 38.)
Most remarkable, however, are the nine rules which he drew up for himself, as subjects for reflection when any one had offended him, viz.--
1. That men were made for each other: even the inferior for the sake of the superior, and these for the sake of one another.
2. The invincible influences that act upon men, and mould their opinions and their acts.
3. That sin is mainly error and ignorance,--an involuntary slavery.
4. That we are ourselves feeble, and by no means immaculate; and that often our very abstinence from faults is due more to cowardice and a care for our reputation than to any freedom from the disposition to commit them.
5. That our judgments are apt to be very rash and premature. "And in short a man must learn a great deal to enable him to pass a correct judgment on another man's acts."
6. When thou art much vexed or grieved, consider that man's life is only a moment, and after a short time we are all laid out dead.
7. That no wrongful act of another can bring shame on us, and that it is not men's acts which disturb us, but our own opinions of them.
8. That our own anger hurts us more than the acts themselves.
9. Thatbenevolence is invincible, if it be not an affected smile,nor acting a part. "For what will the most violent man do to thee if thou continuest benevolent to him? gently and calmly correcting him, admonishing him 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 gregarious animal. And this you must do simply, unreproachfully, affectionately; without rancour, and if possible when you and he are alone." (xi. 18.)
"Not so, my child; thou art injuring thyself, my child." Can all antiquity show anything tenderer than this, or anything more close to the spirit of Christian teaching than these nine rules? They were worthy of the men who, unlike the Stoics in general, considered gentleness to be a virtue, and a proof at once of philosophy and of true manhood. They are written with that effusion of sadness and benevolence to which it is difficult to find a parallel. They show how completely Marcus had triumphed over all petty malignity, and how earnestly he strove to fulfil his own precept of always keeping the thoughts so sweet and clear, that "if any one should suddenly ask, 'What hast thou now in thy thoughts?' with perfect openness thou mightest immediately answer, 'This or That,'" In short, to give them their highest praise, they would have delighted the great Christian Apostle who wrote,--
"Warn them that are unruly, comfort the feeble-minded, support the weak, be patient towards all men. See that none render evil for evil unto any man; but ever follow that which is good, both among yourselves, and to all men." (1 Thess. iv. 14. 15.)
"Count him not as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother." (2. Thess. iv. 15.)
"Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any." (Col. iii. 13.)
Nay, are they not even in full accordance with the mind and spirit of Him who said,--
"If thy brother trespass against thee,go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee thou hast gained thy brother."
In the life of Marcus Aurelius, as in so many lives, we are able to trace the great law of compensation. His exalted station, during the later years of his life, threw him among many who were false and Pharisaical and base; but his youth had been spent under happier conditions, and this saved him from falling into the sadness of those whom neither man nor woman please. In his earlier years it had been his lot to see the fairer side of humanity, and the recollection of those pure and happy days was like a healing tree thrown into the bitter and turbid waters of his reign.
Marcus was now the undisputed lord of the Roman world. He was seated on the dizziest and most splendid eminence which it was possible for human grandeur to obtain.
But this imperial elevation kindled no glow of pride or self-satisfaction in his meek and chastened nature. He regarded himself as being in fact the servant of all. It was his duty, like that of the bull in the herd, or the ram among the flocks, to confront every peril in his own person, to be foremost in all the hardships of war and the most deeply immersed in all the toils of peace. The registry of the citizens, the suppression of litigation, the elevation of public morals, the restraining of consanguineous marriages, the care of minors, the retrenchment of public expenses, the limitation of gladitorial games and shows, the care of roads, the restoration of senatorial privileges, the appointment of none but worthy magistrates--even the regulation of street traffic--these and numberless other duties so completely absorbed his attention that, in spite of indifferent health, they often kept him at severe labour from early morning till long after midnight. His position indeed often necessitated his presence at games and shows, but on these occasions he occupied himself either in reading, or being read to, or in writing notes. He was one of those who held that nothing should be done hastily, and that few crimes were worse than the waste of time. It is to such views and such habits that we owe the compositions of his works. HisMeditationswere written amid the painful self-denial and distracting anxieties of his wars with the Quadi and the Marcomanni, and he was the author of other works which unhappily have perished. Perhaps of all the lost treasures of antiquity there are few which we should feel a greater wish to recover than the lost autobiography of this wisest of Emperors and holiest of Pagan men.
As for the external trappings of his rank,--those gorgeous adjuncts and pompous circumstances which excite the wonder and envy of mankind,--no man could have shown himself more indifferent to them. He recognized indeed the necessity of maintaining the dignity of his high position. "Every moment," he says, "think steadily as a Roman and a manto do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and affection, and freedom, and justice" (ii. 5); and again, "Let the Deity which is in thee be the guardian of a living being,manly and of ripe age, and engaged in matters political, and a Roman, and a ruler, who has taken his post like a man waiting for the signal which summons him from life" (iii. 5). But he didnotthink it necessary to accept the fulsome honours and degrading adulations which were so dear to many of his predecessors. He refused the pompous blasphemy of temples and altars, saying that for every true ruler the world was a temple, and all good men were priests. He declined as much as possible all golden statues and triumphal designations. All inevitable luxuries and splendour, such as his public duties rendered indispensable, he regarded as a mere hollow show. Marcus Aurelius felt as deeply as our own Shakespeare seems to have felt the unsubstantiality, the fleeting evanescence of all earthly things: he would have delighted in the sentiment that,
"We are such stuffAs dreams are made on, and our little lifeIs rounded by a sleep."
"When we have meat before us," he says, "and such eatables, we receive the impression that this is the dead body of a fish, and this is the dead body of a bird, or of a pig;and, again, that this Falerian is only a little grape-juice, and this purple robe some sheep's wool dyed with the blood of a shellfish: such then are these impressions, and they reach the things themselves and penetrate them, and so we see what kind of things they are. Just in the same way.... where there are things which appear most worthy of our approbation,we ought to lay them bare, and look at their worthlessness, and strip them of all the words by which they are exalted." (vi. 13.)
"What is worth being valued? To be received with clapping of hands? No. Neither must we value the clapping of tongues, for the praise which comes from the many is a clapping of tongues." (vi. 16.)
"Asia, Europe, are corners of the universe; all the sea is a drop in the universe; Athos a little clod of the universe; all the present time is a point in eternity. All things arelittle, changeable, perishable"(vi. 36.)
And to Marcus too, no less than to Shakespeare, it seemed that--
"All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely players;"
for he writes these remarkable words:--
"The idle business of show, plays on the stage, flocks of sheep, herds, exercises with spears, a bone cast to little dogs, a bit of bread in fishponds, labourings of ants, and burden-carrying runnings about of frightened little mice, puppets pulled by strings--this is what life resembles. It is thy duty then in the midst of such things to show good humour, and not a proud air; to understand however thatevery man is worth just so much as the things are worth about which he busies himself."
In fact, the Court was to Marcus a burden; he tells us himself that Philosophy was his mother, Empire only his stepmother; it was only his repose in the one that rendered even tolerable to him the burdens of the other. Emperor as he was, he thanked the gods for having enabled him to enter into the souls of a Thrasea, an Helvidius, a Cato, a Brutus. Above all, he seems to have had a horror of ever becoming like some of his predecessors; he writes:--
"Take care that thou art not made into a Caesar;[68]take care thou art not dyed with this dye. Keep thyself then simple, good, pure, serious, free from affectation, a friend of justice, a worshipper of the gods, kind, affectionate, strenuous in all proper acts. Reverence the gods and help men. Short is life. Thereis only one fruit of this terrene life; a pious disposition and social acts." (iv. 19,)
[68]Marcus here invents what M. Martha justly calls "an admirable barbarism" to express his disgust towards such men--[Greek: ora mae apukaidaoosaes]--"take care not to beCaesarised."
It is the same conclusion as that which sorrow forced from another weary and less admirable king: "Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep His commandments; for this is the whole duty of man."
But it is time for us to continue the meagre record of the life of Marcus, so far as the bare and gossiping compilations of Dion Cassius,[69]and Capitolinus, and the scattered allusions of other writers can enable us to do so.
[69]As epitomised by Xiphilinus.
It must have been with a heavy heart that he set out once more for Germany to face the dangerous rising of the Quadi and Marcomanni. To obtain soldiers sufficient to fill up the vacancies in his army which had been decimated by the plague, he was forced to enrol slaves; and to obtain money he had to sell the ornaments of the palace, and even some of the Empress's jewels. Immediately before he started his heart was wrung by the death of his little boy, the twin-brother of Commodus, whose beautiful features are still preserved for us on coins. Early in the war, as he was trying the depth of a ford, he was assailed by the enemy with a sudden storm of missiles, and was only saved from imminent death by being sheltered beneath the shields of his soldiers. One battle was fought on the ice of the wintry Danube. But by far the most celebrated event of the war took place in a great victory over the Quadi which he won in A.D. 174, and which was attributed by the Christians to what is known as the "Miracle of the Thundering Legion."
Divested of all extraneous additions, the fact which occurred,--as established by the evidence of medals, and by one of the bass-relievi on the "Column of Antonine,"--appears to have been as follows. Marcus Aurelius and his army had been entangled in a mountain defile, into which they had too hastily pursued a sham retreat of the barbarian archers. In this defile, unable either to fight or to fly, pent in by the enemy, burned up with the scorching heat and tormented by thirst, they lost all hope, burst into wailing and groans, and yielded to a despair from which not even the strenuous efforts of Marcus could arouse them. At the most critical moment of their danger and misery the clouds began to gather, and heavy shows of rain descended, which the soldiers caught in their shields and helmets to quench their own thirst and that of their horses. While they were thus engaged the enemy attacked them; but the rain was mingled with hail, and fell with blinding fury in the faces of the barbarians. The storm was also accompanied with thunder and lightning, which seems to have damaged the enemy, and filled them with terror, while no casualty occured in the Roman ranks. The Romans accordingly regarded this as a Divine interposition, and achieved a most decisive victory, which proved to be the practical conclusion of a hazardous and important war.
The Christians regarded the event not asprovidential but as miraculous, and attributed it to the prayers of their brethren in a legion which, from this circumstance, received the name of the "Thundering Legion." It is however now known that one of the legions, distinguished by a flash of lightning which was represented on their shields, had been known by this name since the time of Augustus; and the Pagans themselves attributed the assistance which they had received sometimes to a prayer of the pious Emperor and sometimes to the incantations of an Egyptian sorcerer named Arnuphis.
One of the Fathers, the passionate and eloquent Tertullian, attributes to this deliverance an interposition of the Emperor in favour of the Christians, and appeals to a letter of his to the Senate in which he acknowledged how effectual had been the aid he had received from Christian prayers, and forbade any one hereafter to molest the followers of the new religion, lest they should use against him the weapon of supplication which had been so powerful in his favour. This letter is preserved at the end of theApologyof Justin Martyr, and it adds that, not only are no Christians to be injured or persecuted, but that any one who informed against them is to be burned alive! We see at once that this letter is one of those impudent and transparent forgeries in which the literature of the first five centuries unhappily abounds. What was the real relation of Marcus to the Christians we shall consider hereafter.
To the gentle heart of Marcus, all war, even when accompanied with victories, was eminently distasteful; and in such painful and ungenial occupations no small part of his life was passed. What he thought of war and of its successes is graphically set forth in the following remark:--
"A spider is proud when it has caught a fly, and another 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 or bears,and another when he has taken Sarmatians.Are not these robbers, when thou examinest their principles?" He here condemns his own involuntary actions; but it was his unhappy destiny not to have trodden out the embers of this war before he was burdened with another far more painful and formidable.
This was the revolt of Avidius Cassius, a general of the old blunt Roman type, whom, in spite of some ominous warnings, Marcus both loved and trusted. The ingratitude displayed by such a man caused Marcus the deepest anguish; but he was saved from all dangerous consequences by the wide-spread affection which he had inspired by his virtuous reign.
The very soldiers of the rebellious general fell away from him; and, after he had been a nominal Emperor for only three months and six days, he was assassinated by some of his own officers. His head was sent to Marcus, who received it with sorrow, and did not hold out to the murderers the slightest encouragement. The joy of success was swallowed up in regret that his enemy had not lived to allow him the luxury of a genuine forgiveness. He begged the Senate to pardon all the family of Cassius, and to suffer this single life to be the only one forfeited in consequence of civil war. The Fathers received these proofs of clemency with the rapture which they deserved, and the Senate-house resounded with acclamations and blessings.
Never had a formidable conspiracy been more quietly and effectually crushed. Marcus travelled through the provinces which had favoured the cause of Avidius Cassius, and treated them all with the most complete and indulgent forbearance. When he arrived in Syria, the correspondence of Cassius was brought to him, and, with a glorious magnanimity of which history affords but few examples, he consigned it all to the flames unread.
During this journey of pacification, he lost his wife Faustina, who died suddenly in one of the valleys of Mount Taurus. History, or the collection of anecdotes which at this period often passes as history, has assigned to Faustina a character of the darkest infamy, and it has even been made a charge against Aurelius that he overlooked or condoned her offences. As far as Faustina is concerned, we have not much to say, although there is strong reason to believe that many of the stories told of her are scandalously exaggerated, if not absolutely false. Certain it is, that most of the imputations upon her memory rest on the malignant anecdotes recorded by Dion, who dearly loved every piece of scandal which degraded human nature. Thespecificcharge brought against her of having tempted Cassius from his allegiance is wholly unsupported, even if it be not absolutely incompatible with what we find in her own existent letters; and, finally, Marcus himself not only loved her tenderly, as the kind mother of his eleven children, but in hisMeditationsactually thanks the gods for having granted him "such a wife, so obedient so affectionate, and so simple." No doubt Faustina was unworthy of her husband; but surely it is the glory and not the shame of a noble nature to be averse from jealousy and suspicion, and to trust to others more deeply than they deserve.
So blameless was the conduct of Marcus Aurelius that neither the malignity of contemporaries nor the sprit of posthumous scandal has succeeded in discovering any flaw in the extreme integrity of his life and principles. But meanness will not be baulked of its victims. The hatred of all excellence which made Caligula try to put down the memory of great men rages, though less openly, in the minds of many. They delight to degrade human life into that dull and barren plain "in which every molehill is a mountain, and every thistle a forest-tree." Great men are as small in their eyes as they are said to be in the eyes of their valets; and there are multitudes who, if they find
"Some stain or blemish in a name of note,Not grieving that their greatest are so small,Innate themselves with some insane delight,And judge all nature from her feet of clay,Without the will to lift their eyes, and seeHer godlike head crown'd with spiritual fire,And touching other worlds."
This I suppose is the reason why, failing to drag down Marcus Aurelius from his moral elevation, some have attempted to assail his reputation because of the supposed vileness of Faustina and the actual depravity of Commodus. Of Faustina I have spoken already. Respecting Commodus, I think it sufficient to ask with Solomon: "Who knoweth whether his son shall be a wise man or a fool?" Commodus was but nineteen when his father died; for the first three years of his reign he ruled respectably and acceptably. Marcus Aurelius had left no effort untried to have him trained aright by the first teachers and the wisest men whom the age produced; and Herodian distinctly tells us that he had lived virtuously up to the time of his father's death. Setting aside natural affection altogether, and even assuming (as I should conjecture from one or two passages of hisMeditations) that Marcus had misgivings about his son, would it have been easy, would it have been even possible, to set aside on general grounds a son who had attained to years of maturity? However this may be, if there are any who think it worth while to censure Marcus because, after all, Commodus turned out to be but "a warped slip of wilderness," their censure is hardly sufficiently discriminating to deserve the trouble of refutation.
"But Marcus Aurelius cruelly persecuted the Christians." Let us briefly consider this charge. That persecutions took place in his reign is an undeniable fact, and is sufficiently evidenced by the Apologies of Justin Martyr, of Melito Bishop of Sardis, of Athenagoras, and of Apollinarius, as well as by the Letter of the Church of Smyrna describing the martyrdom of Polycarp, and that of the Churches of Lyons and Vienne to their brethren in Asia Minor. It is fair, however, to mention that there is some documentary evidence on the other side; Lactantius clearly asserts that under the reigns of those excellent princes who succeeded Domitian the Church suffered no violence from her enemies, and "spread her hands towards the East and the West:" Tertullian, writing but twenty years after the death of Marcus, distinctly says (and Eusebius quotes the assertion), that there were letters of the Emperor, in which he not only attributed his delivery among the Quadi to the prayers of Christian soldiers in the "Thundering Legion," but ordered any who informed against the Christians to be most severely punished; and at the end of the works of Justin Martyr is found a letter of similar purport, which is asserted to have been addressed by Marcus to the Senate of Rome. We may set aside these peremptory testimonies, we may believe that Tertullian and Eusebius were mistaken, and that the documents to which they referred were spurious; but this should make us also less certain about the prominent participation of the Emperor in these persecutions. My own belief is (and it is a belief which could be supported by many critical arguments), that his share in causing them was almost infinitesimal. If those who love his memory reject the evidence of Fathers in his favour, they may be at least permitted to withhold assent from some of the assertions in virtue of which he is condemned.
Marcus in hisMeditationsalludes to the Christians once only, and then it is to make a passing complaint of the indifference to death, which appeared to him, as it appeared to Epictetus, to arise, not from any noble principles, but from mere obstinacy and perversity. That he shared the profound dislike with which Christians were regarded is very probable. That he was a cold-blooded and virulent persecutor is utterly unlike his whole character, essentially at variance with his habitual clemency, alien to the spirit which made him interfere in every possible instance to mitigate the severity of legal punishments, and may in short be regarded as an assertion which is altogether false. Who will believe that a man who during his reign built and dedicated but one single temple, and that a Temple to Beneficence; that a man who so far from showing any jealousy respecting foreign religions allowed honour to be paid to them all; that a man whose writings breathe on every page the inmost spirit of philanthropy and tenderness, went out of his way to join in a persecution of the most innocent, the most courageous, and the most inoffensive of his subjects?
The true state of the case seems to have been this. The deep calamities in which, during the whole reign of Marcus the Empire was involved, caused widespread distress, and roused into peculiar fury the feelings of the provincials against men whose atheism (for such they considered it to be) had kindled the anger of the gods. This fury often broke out into paroxisms of popular excitement, which none but the firmest-minded governers were able to moderate or to repress. Marcus, when appealed to, simply let the existing law take its usual course. That law was as old as the time of Trajan. The young Pliny, Governor of Bithynia, had written to ask Trajan how he was to deal with the Christians, whose blamelessness of life he fully admitted, but whose doctrines, he said, had emptied the temples of the gods, and exasperated their worshippers. Trajan in reply had ordered that the Christians should not besoughtfor, but that, if they were brought before the governor, and proved to be contumacious in refusing to adjure their religion, they were then to be put to death. Hadrian and Antoninus Pius had continued the same policy, and Marcus Aurilius saw no reason to alter it. But this law, which in quiet times might become a mere dead letter, might at more troubled periods be converted into a dangerous engine of persecution, as it was in the case of the venerable Polycarp, and in the unfortunate Churches of Lyons and Vienne. The Pagans believed that the reason why their gods were smiling in secret,--
"Looking over wasted lands,Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fierysands,--
"Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and prayinghands,--"
was the unbelief and impiety of these hated Galileans, causes of offence which could only be expiated by the death of the guilty. "Their enemies," says Tertullian, "call aloud for the blood of the innocent, alleging this vain pretext for their hatred, that they believe the Christians to be the cause of every public misfortune. If the Tiber has overflowed its banks, or the Nile has not overflowed, if heaven has refused its rain, if famine or the plague has spread its ravages, the cry is immediate, 'The Christians to the lions.'" In the first three centuries the cry of "No Christianity" became at times as brutal, as violent, and as unreasoning as the cry of "No Popery" has often been in modern days. It was infinitely less disgraceful to Marcus to lend his ear to the one than it has been to some eminent modern statesmen to be carried away by the insensate fury of the other.
To what extent is Marcus Aurelius to be condemned for the martyrdoms which took place in his reign? Not, I think, heavily or indiscriminately, or with vehement sweeping censure. Common justice surely demands that we should not confuse the present with the past, or pass judgment on the conduct of the Emperor as though he were living in the nineteenth century, or as though he had been acting in full cognisance of the Gospels and the stones of the Saints. Wise and good men before him had, in their haughty ignorance, spoken of Christianity with execration and contempt. The philosophers who surrounded his throne treated it with jealousy and aversion. The body of the nation firmly believed the current rumours which charged its votaries with horrible midnight assemblies, rendered infamous by Thyestian banquets and the atrocities of nameless superstitions. These foul calumnies--these hideous charges of cannibalism and incest,--were supported by the reiterated perjury of slaves under torture, which in that age, as well as long afterwards, was preposterously regarded as a sure criterion of truth.
Christianity in that day was confounded with a multitude of debased and foreign superstitions; and the Emperor in his judicial capacity, if he ever encountered Christians at all, was far more likely to encounter those who were unworthy of the name, than to become acquainted with the meek, unworldly, retiring virtues of the calmest, the holiest, and the best. When we have given their due weight to considerations such as these we shall be ready to pardon Marcus Aurelius for having, in this matter, acted ignorantly, and to admit that in persecuting Christianity he may most honestly have thought that he was doing God service. The very sincerity of his belief, the conscientiousness of his rule, the intensity of his philanthrophy, the grandeur of his own philosophical tenets, all conspired to make him a worse enemy of the Church than a brutal Commodus or a disgusting Heliogabalus. And yet that there was not in him the leastpropensityto persecute; that these persecutions were for the most part spontaneous and accidental; that they were in no measure due to his direct instigation, or in special accordance with his desire, is clear from the fact that the martyrdoms took place in Gaul and Asia Minor,not in Rome. There must have been hundreds of Christians in Rome, and under the very eye of the Emperor; nay, there were even multitudes of Christians in his own army; yet we never hear of his having molested any of them. Melito, Bishop of Sardis, in addressing the Emperor, expresses a doubt as to whether he was really aware of the manner in which his Christian subjects were treated. Justin Martyr, in hisApology, addresses him in terms of perfect confidence and deep respect. In short he was in this matter "blameless, but unfortunate." It is painful to think that the venerable Polycarp, and the thoughtful Justin may have forfeited their lives for their principles, not only in the reign of so good a man, but even by virtue of his authority; but we must be very uncharitable or very unimaginative if we cannot readily believe that, though they had received the crown of martyrdom from his hands, the redeemed spirits of those great martyrs would have been the first to welcome this holiest of the heathen into the presence of a Saviour whose Church he persecuted, but to whose indwelling Spirit his virtues were due? whom ignorantly and unconsciously he worshipped, and whom had he ever heard of Him and known Him, he would have loved in his heart and glorified by the consistency of his noble and stainless life.
The persecution of the Churches in Lyons and Vienne happened in A.D. 177. Shortly after this period fresh wars recalled the Emperor to the North. It is said that, in despair of ever seeing him again, the chief men of Rome entreated him to address them his farewell admonitions, and that for three days he discoursed to them on philosophical questions. When he arrived at the seat of war, victory again crowned his arms. But Marcus was now getting old, and he was worn out with the toils, trials, and travels of his long and weary life. He sunk under mental anxieties and bodily fatigues, and after a brief illness died in Pannonia, either at Vienna or Sirmium, on March 17, A.D. 180, in the fifty-ninth year of his age and the twentieth of his reign.
Death to him was no calamity. He was sadly aware that "there is no man so fortunate that there shall not be by him when he is dying some who are pleased with what is going to happen. Suppose that he was a good and wise man, will there not be at last some one to say of him, 'Let us at last breathe freely, being relieved from this schoolmaster. It is true that he was harsh to none of us, but I perceive that he tacitly condemns us.'... Thou wilt consider this when thou art dying, and wilt depart more contentedly by reflecting thus: 'I am going awayfrom a life in which even my associates, on behalf of whom I have striven, and cared, and prayed so much, themselves wish me to depart, hoping perchance to get some little advantage by it.' Why then should a man cling to a longer stay here?Do not, however, for this reason go away less kindly disposed to them, but preserving thy own character, and continuing friendly, and benevolent, and kind" And dreading death far less than he dreaded any departure from the laws of virtue, he exclaims, "Come quickly, O Death, for fear that at last I should forget myself." This utterance has been well compared to the language which Bossuet put into the mouth of a Christian soul:--"O Death; thou dost not trouble my designs, thou accomplishest them. Haste, then, O favourable Death!...Nunc Dimittis."
A nobler, a gentler, a purer, a sweeter soul,--a soul less elated by prosperity, or more constant in adversity--a soul more fitted by virtue, and chastity, and self-denial to enter into the eternal peace, never passed into the presence of its Heavenly Father. We are not surprised that all, whose means permitted it, possessed themselves of his statues, and that they were to be seen for years afterwards among the household gods of heathen families, who felt themselves more hopeful and more happy from the glorious sense of possibility which was inspired by the memory of one who, in the midst of difficulties, and breathing an atmosphere heavy with corruption, yet showed himself so wise, so great, so good a man.
O framed for nobler times and calmer hearts!O studious thinker, eloquent for truth!Philosopher, despising wealth and death,But patient, childlike, full of life and love!