Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/18

 Rusticus, a sense of his own inability, and the urgent claims of his imperial station had diverted him from his boyish ambitions as student and author to the endeavour to act justly and to speak the truth, not to converse and write about goodness.

Again, on the very threshold of his second Book, he interrupts himself to say: 'Put away your books, remember that you are an old man, do not suffer your real self to be any longer a bond-servant.' That by his books he means not his library merely but actual composition is evident from a later passage: 'Do not wander from your path any longer; you are not likely to read your Notebooks, your Deeds of ancient worthies of Rome and Greece, the Extracts you made from literature and put by against old age.'

Clearly he had, at some time, devoted himself to a variety of composition, some of it original, some derived from his reading and reflection in history and literature. Here he resembles his successor Julian, our own King Alfred, and Frederick the Great of Prussia. His aspirations had been postponed to his public duty, his writing put on one side and never completed.

That we possess a considerable and, in form at least, most original work from his pen contradicts this depreciation of literary ambition and his repeatedly expressed diffidence of his own gift for philosophy.

Besides the present work, written in Greek, there survive the fragments of a correspondence with his Latin and rhetoric master, the famous orator, M. Cornelius Fronto. The letters cover the years 138–circ. 165. This x