Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/368

 his public and ending with his private life. At some places he appears to be, perhaps unconsciously, contrasting Antoninus with his predecessor Hadrian. His love of old ways, his religious conservatism is opposed to Hadrian's variety and caprice, his public economy and private thrift to Hadrian's extravagance, his simplicity to Hadrian's passion for building, for luxurious dinners and boy favourites. Hadrian too was envious and intolerant of rivals, even of men of genius like the architect Apollodorus, and the fantastic extravagance of his famous villa at Tivoli may have seemed to Marcus in strange contrast to the old-fashioned country residences of Pius. As we read of this simple, practical country gentleman we are reminded of the restless, irritable, often (especially at the close of his life) unhappy and unhealthy man of genius, Hadrian.

'''Ch. 17.''' This closing chapter reads like a prayer of thanksgiving. The expression of happiness is in marked contrast to the sad, almost sombre, tone of so much of the later Books. There is also an undoubted tendency to retrospective idealization of persons, notably in the few words about his colleague, Lucius Aurelius Verus. Writers too on this period have usually preferred to accept the scandals contained in the biographers about Faustina's character to Marcus' own simple and convincing statement. The evidence that Marcus shared the belief of most of his contemporaries in the occasional revelation of God to man by dreams and oracles is noteworthy. There is very little trace of this in the Meditations as a whole.

§ 1. The good sister is Annia Cornificia Faustina the elder, the only other child of Marcus' parents. She married M. Ummidius Quadratus, and Marcus handed over to her the whole of his paternal inheritance. To her son he gave a portion of the fortune he inherited from his mother, Domitia Lucilla.

§ 2. What he says of his youthful innocence will remind the reader of Milton's

and of Hawthorne's beautiful words: 'Living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart.' Mark Pattison has referred to this passage: 'I experienced what Marcus Aurelius reckoned among the favours of the gods, and the growth of anything that could be called 276