Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/478

 St. Augustine reflected upon this, with special reference to the pre-existence of the individual spirit. As he dwells upon this problem he remarks, very much in the manner of Marcus: 'And lo! my infancy died long since, and I am alive.' 'Declare to me, your suppliant, did my infancy succeed to some age of mine that is also dead?'

Bishop Butler appears to have had this passage in mind when he wrote: 'We have passed undestroyed through those many and great resolutions of matter, so peculiarly appropriated to us ourselves; why should we imagine death will be so fatal to us?'

Marcus does not draw any such conclusion. True to his sober and patient thinking, he gives merely the older view of pantheistic thought: we are to realize that death is an example of the universal law of continuity and change, of generation and dissolution. That being so, our duty is to accept the rule, without question, to welcome it as an aspect of the eternal order; we must at last fall into earth's lap, like the ripe olive (iv. 48; v. 4).

After stating the general law he illustrates it from his own life. His father's early death put him under the guardianship of his grandfather, Annius Verus, the prefect of the City of Rome. Then he lived with his mother Domitia Lucilla, under the direction of her grandfather, Catilius Severus. Next, by Hadrian's enactment, he was adopted by Titus Aurelius Antoninus, and on the latter's accession shortly became Caesar, or heir apparent, and married his cousin, the younger Faustina.

His apprehensions about these changes were false; there was nothing to fear; neither then is the approaching change, Death itself, to be feared.

'''Ch. 20.''' This is the same reflection as we met in vii. 29, and shall meet again in ix. 38.

'''Chs. 22–3.''' After restating the triple relation of the self to God, to a neighbour, and to his own constitution (the main subject of Book ii, with a stress here upon the subordination and co-ordination involved), he passes to the recognition of his own role in the imperial commonwealth, which is the counterpart of his place as a member of the Eternal city. Loyalty to those 386