Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/23

 would expect from so ardent an admirer. Even in that curious vision of judgement, the Symposium or Kronia, where Marcus is made to speak in his own behalf, the language, though faithful to his habitual manner of life and thought, does not reflect the style we know so well. There is no attempt at verbal representation. The nearest suggestion is in the passage where Marcus is summoned before the divine conclave. He enters shining in bodily form with the 'purest and clearest light'. This looks like a reference to two passages in the Meditations. Julian's own style is rhetorical to excess and atticizing, he is full of reminiscences of Homer and the Attic tragedians and Plato, his linguistic affinity is to the Neoplatonist writers and not to Stoicism; thus he may have instinctively avoided any verbal imitation of Marcus. Indeed his own work belongs to an epoch which had absorbed the practical truths of Stoicism and Christianity, but which had submerged the distinctive reflective attitude of the Porch under a flood of orientalism and mystical writing.

The first direct mention of the Meditations as a book known to his hearers is made by the friend of Julian, the orator Themistius, in 364, the year after Julian's death. He is addressing Valens, the feeble colleague of Valentinian I, on Brotherly Love, and says: 'You have no need of the Admonitions of a Marcus or the excellent words of this or that ruler of days gone by; you have your Phoenix in your own house.' The title Admonitions xv