Page:Marcus Aurelius (Haines 1916).djvu/21

INTRODUCTION acuteuess of intellect, and there is a good deal of repetition unavoidable in the nature of the work, for "line upon line" and "precept upon precept" are required in all moral teaching.

Of his two great Stoic predecessors Marcus has no affinity with Seneca. He certainly knew all about him and they have many thoughts in common, but Seneca's rhetorical flamboyance, his bewildering contradictions, the glaring divergence between his profession and his practice have no counterpart in Marcus. Epictetus the Phrygian slave was his true spiritual father, but we do not find in the Emperor the somewhat rigid didacticism and spiritual dogmatism of his predecessor. Marcus is humbler and not so confident. The hardness and arrogance of Stoicism are softened in him by an infusion of Platonism and other philosophies. With the Peripatetics he admits the inequality of faults. His humanity will not cast out compassion as an emotion of the heart. His is no cut and dried creed, for he often wavers and is inconsistent. Call not his teaching ineffectual. He is not trying to teach anyone. He is reasoning with his own soul and championing its cause against the persuasions and impulses of the flesh. How far did he succeed? "By nature a good man," says Dio, "his education and the moral training he imposed upon himself xiii