Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/399

 minds are directed to right ends. These right ends are, to sum up what he has said in this Book, 'to love and welcome what befalls a man and is ordained for him, to keep the divinity untainted by evil imaginations, to follow God, to speak the truth and to act justly'.

There is a further difficulty. Who are the men who disbelieve in the gods, betray their country, do evil behind locked doors? Mr. Haines has suggested that the Emperor means the Christians, against whom precisely these charges were levelled. We should then have a severe condemnation of his Christian subjects, insinuated and not openly stated, by the ruler whom Mr. Haines regards as having been actually favourable to the infant Church. The same charges were levelled against the followers of Epicurus by the vulgar, and Lucian classes them with the Christians as atheists. But Marcus founded an Epicurean chair at Athens, and though he criticizes their atomism and their pursuit of pleasure, he nowhere passes a moral censure upon them. Rather, like Seneca, he takes comfort from some of their brave sayings (vii. 33. 64; ix. 41; xi. 26). Is it necessary to suppose that he means any others than those evil men, whom he so often refers to as ignorantly doing evil in darkness? (iii. 4. 4; vi. 59; x. 13.)

With regard to Nero, it is remarkable how soon he became the type of a tyrant, taking the place which Caligula holds in the pages of Seneca. Epictetus couples his name with that of Sardanapalus, and Nero became the Antichrist in early Christian literature.

The Book ends, like the last, with an effective epilogue, the final words, 'in accord with the genius allotted to him at birth', introducing under the name of Moira the divinity within the breast (iii. 4. 3).



With this Book we enter upon a series of Meditations composed in a manner markedly different from the second and third Books. The tone is less personal and devotional, more speculative and doctrinal; the style too is easier and less condensed. In particular the indwelling spirit is rarely mentioned, appeal being rather Rh