Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/479

 relations resembles the duty of a citizen of a State to observe its ordinances. The conception of his own position as head of the State is faithful to the ideal of the Roman Stoics which he sketched in i. 14.

'''Ch. 24.''' A group of images suggested by a satirical sense of the aimlessness and pettiness of human endeavour. Marcus used the simile of children at play in v. 33, to pass from that to the transitory nature of human life. Here his thought moves from the quarrels of children over their dolls to the grim picture of spirits bearing about dead bodies (iv. 41), and so to the imagination of Homer's underworld of shadowy wraiths, a realm as insubstantial as the present.

'''Ch. 25.''' This is a brief reminder of what he set out fully in iii. 11. Similar notes will be found at iv. 21 end; vi. 3; vii. 29; viii. 11; xii. 8, 10, 18, and 29. The principal omission here is that of relation (xii. 10), viz. the reference of an object to its end.

'''Ch. 26.''' An expression of regret for mistaken efforts and anxieties, given in greater detail in viii. 1.

'''Ch. 27.''' The reflection in ch. 18 that we may ignore the opinions of others, when we see their manner of living, here takes an unexpected turn. We are to be charitable to them, although their lives and aims are unworthy, and we shall be encouraged in this by observing that the gods are good to them, assisting them by dreams and augury.

In view of his own attitude to prayer in ch. 40, that it should be a request for help to be right-minded, and his usual teaching that man's true ends can be secured by sound understanding and sincere effort, without the special help which weakness tempts man to ask of God, we cannot but detect a certain irony in his words. Yet he himself thanks the gods for their revealed help for bodily ailments (i. 17. 9), so that he shared the common conviction of his time that God sometimes speaks to men, and not to good men only, in visions and dreams.

His attitude closely resembles that of Socrates, who told his followers to use their understanding for the purpose to which it was given by God, and only where there was genuine obscurity to consult the art of prophecy. So Socrates himself believed in the Divine voice vouchsafed to him from childhood, and expressly Rh