Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/416

 Cicero which Byron paraphrases. Pausanias moralizes also upon Nineveh and Babylon, as Lucian does in his Charon.

Both Plato and Aristotle thought there had been many destructions of men in the long past ages, by deluge, disease, or other causes, after which a handful of survivors slowly rebuilt civilization. Thus Plato in Critias dates the destruction of the fabled Atlantis at the third deluge before Deucalion, the Noah of Greek legend.

The moral for the individual is pointed by Seneca, 'the sea swallowed Helice and Buris entire: am I to be afraid for one little human frame?' Marcus draws the moral for humanity, with its passage from conception to corruption, and the Middle Ages added to the sadness by making the origin of man evil, as we get it in Chaucer's 'and nat bigeten of mannes sperme unclene'.

M. Casaubon's note on 'ashes or a skeleton', with an account of the urns at Newington in Kent, seems to have set Sir Tho. Browne on the study of Norfolk urns which prompted his famous Urn Burial, with its opening phrase: 'When the funeral pyre was out, and the last valediction over, men took a lasting adieu of their interred friends, little expecting the curiosity of future ages should comment upon their ashes.'

The beautiful close upon inanimate nature, here given a voice of thankfulness, contrasts remarkably with Pascal's 'le dernier acte est sanglant, quelque belle que soit le comédie en tout le reste: on jette enfin de la terre sur la tête, et en voilà pour jamais.'

'''Ch. 49.''' The simile of the wise man's security goes back to Homer's comparison of a battle-line to a strong headland. Virgil used it of King Latinus, from whom Seneca transferred it to the wise man's constancy, and Tennyson employs it in his poem Will.

The second half of the chapter is on the subject of bearing apparent misfortunes. The right attitude to sorrow and ill-fortune is summarized at the close of Book v.

'''Ch. 50.''' A reflection upon length of life to be compared with xii. 27. That the names of almost all these old men are now mere 324