Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/417

 names illustrates Marcus' theme. The last words are a curious play upon a three days' child and the thrice-veteran Nestor.

'''Ch. 51.''' A quiet epilogue.



This Book consists of little essays, principally on familiar moral themes, and is almost free from the technical expressions of the Stoic school. The lessons may be intended for Marcus himself, but they read more like admonitions to a learner. More than any of the Books it might be taken to be the work of an older man addressing a younger.

Marcus appears also to be writing with a more conscious literary aim, and the Book is in consequence simpler in its effect. The first and the last chapters are in the dialogue form which is familiar to us from the satires of Horace and Persius. There are two attempts in the more cynical manner, chs. 12 and 28, the former of which fails through want of literary skill. Chapter 8 is a short justification of suffering by a comparison of Nature's treatment of man to the pains inflicted by the god of healing, Aesculapius, upon his patients.

There is an entire absence of the historical references which meet the reader in most of the Books, and no reference to the position and responsibilities of Marcus himself. Towards the end a kind of despondency, like that of Book ii, closes over the writer, and ch. 33 is very sad and hopeless in its condensed expression of despair, and disdain of mortal life.

'''Ch. 1.''' The single Greek word 'At dawn' resembles the 'At daybreak' which heralds Book ii. The discourse on the familiar text: 'Are mortals born to sleep their lives away' is enlivened by the appeal to the example of animals: 'Go to the ant thou sluggard and consider her ways.' This simple philosophy, familiar to us from the Old Testament, is rare in Greek and Latin authors; it is absent, for instance, from Persius' third Satire which is on the same subject, 'Sleep'. The topic may have been familiar from the proverbs of common folk, but the Fables of Aesop and Babrius, like the medieval stories of Reynard the Fox, are not in this vein; animals are introduced in a cynical way to satirize men's foibles, which they share, not to serve as an example to them. We meet Rh