Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/20

 endeavoured to learn plays truant.' Marcus had been used from his boyhood to speak and write in Greek; it was as familiar to him, no doubt, as French was to Frederick the Great.

There followed in Marcus' life a momentous breach with mere rhetoric. He had been reading Aristo, the Stoic philosopher. He tells Fronto that he cannot argue on both sides of a question any longer; he is indeed turning from his old tutor to follow Rusticus and philosophy. Fronto rallies him upon the contorted and crabbed stock-in-trade of his new Stoic models, warns him shrewdly of the danger he runs in deserting Latin eloquence, but to no purpose. The young Caesar had made up his mind; for him oratory becomes henceforth a dead letter.

Here and there, in the subsequent centuries, we meet references to a collection of private letters by Marcus, in Greek, which survived, whether genuine or not, to the ninth or the tenth century, the period of the Byzantine renaissance. Thus Philostratus remarks of this correspondence, in distinction from imperial constitutions and rescripts, that: 'besides precision of thought, the strength of Marcus' character is stamped on his words', a summary of the Emperor's style not inapt to parts of his authentic Book. Again in the ninth century, the learned Patriarch Photius, writing to Amphilochius, Bishop of Cyzicus, commends to his attention certain epistolary models, xii