Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/472

 is seldom elsewhere mentioned in the Meditations. The point of view is deistic rather than pantheistic, a side of Stoical philosophy (or of general contemporary thought) which left its trace, at any rate linguistically, upon the Neoplatonic writers of a later date, with their doctrine of 'powers' flowing into the visible and created world from the eternal realm of ideas.

These 'natural powers' play a part in Galen's physiology, and his teaching about them, which went back to Hippocrates, is the original of the 'dormitive' and other faculties with which Molière makes merry.

'''Ch. 2.''' Marcus begins with the image of life as a banquet, an image employed with such force by Lucretius. In his usual manner he slightly alters the maxim of worldly writers, that the guest should leave life's table after enjoying its good things, or if dissatisfied should rise at once and go. Happier, Marcus says, to depart without tasting the allurements of evil; next best to go like a disillusioned diner.

From this he turns to another allegory, drawn from the pestilence which devastated the Empire. Far worse, far more to be avoided, is the plague which destroys the understanding. Some historians have supposed that this pestilence, which the legions brought back as a punishment for the sack of Ctesiphon, in Mesopotamia, was a principal cause of the decline of the Empire. It was still prevalent in the reign of Commodus, and broke out again later. The last words of Marcus, by one account, were: 'Why weep for me and not think rather of the pestilence and the general mortality?'

'''Ch. 3.''' Here Marcus returns to a favourite remedy in the prospect of death. Death is natural, as natural as birth and adolescence, and all life's seasons from sowing time to harvest. Death then is to be welcomed. Later he illustrates his meaning from the steps his own life had traced. Each change, however dreaded, had proved natural when it was completed. The chapter ends upon a different note from that of v. 10. There he expresses 380