Seekers after God Part 15

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. That _benevolence 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 const.i.tuted 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 trespa.s.s 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.

CHAPTER III.

THE LIFE AND THOUGHTS OF MARCUS AURELIUS _(continued)._

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. His _Meditations_ were 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 circ.u.mstances 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 man _to 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 did _not_ think 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 stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is 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 sh.e.l.lfish_: 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 are _little, 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 that _every 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds, kind, affectionate, strenuous in all proper acts. Reverence the G.o.ds and help men. Short is life. There _is only one fruit of this terrene life; a pious disposition and social acts_." (iv. 19,)

[Footnote 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 be _Caesarised_."]

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 G.o.d, 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 Ca.s.sius,[69] and Capitolinus, and the scattered allusions of other writers can enable us to do so.

[Footnote 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 a.s.sailed 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 ba.s.s-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 as _providential but as miraculous_, and attributed it to the prayers of their brethren in a legion which, from this circ.u.mstance, 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 a.s.sistance 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 pa.s.sionate 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 the _Apology_ of 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 pa.s.sed. 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 Ca.s.sius, a general of the old blunt Roman type, whom, in spite of some ominous warnings, Marcus both loved and trusted. The ingrat.i.tude 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 a.s.sa.s.sinated 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 Ca.s.sius, 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 Ca.s.sius, and treated them all with the most complete and indulgent forbearance. When he arrived in Syria, the correspondence of Ca.s.sius 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 pa.s.ses as history, has a.s.signed 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. The _specific_ charge brought against her of having tempted Ca.s.sius 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 his _Meditations_ actually thanks the G.o.ds 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 n.o.ble 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 mult.i.tudes 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 see Her G.o.dlike 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 a.s.sail 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 a.s.suming (as I should conjecture from one or two pa.s.sages of his _Meditations_) 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 doc.u.mentary evidence on the other side; Lactantius clearly a.s.serts 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 a.s.sertion), 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 a.s.serted 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 doc.u.ments to which they referred were spurious; but this should make us also less certain about the prominent partic.i.p.ation 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 a.s.sent from some of the a.s.sertions in virtue of which he is condemned.

Marcus in his _Meditations_ alludes to the Christians once only, and then it is to make a pa.s.sing complaint of the indifference to death, which appeared to him, as it appeared to Epictetus, to arise, not from any n.o.ble 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 a.s.sertion 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 wide-spread 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 G.o.ds. 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 G.o.ds, and exasperated their worshippers.

Trajan in reply had ordered that the Christians should not be _sought_ for, 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 G.o.ds were smiling in secret,--

"Looking over wasted lands, Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,--