“Don’t go too far in your books and overgrasp yourself. Alas, you have
no time left to peruse your diary, to read over the Greek and Roman
history: come, don’t flatter and deceive yourself; look to the main
chance, to the end and design of reading, and mind life more than
notion: I say, if you have a kindness for your person, drive at the
practice and help yourself, for that is in your own power.”
It seems to me that here for style and force Jeremy Collier can (to say
the least) perfectly stand comparison with Mr. Long. Jeremy Collier’s
real defect as a translator is not his coarseness and vulgarity, but his
imperfect acquaintance with Greek; this is a serious defect, a fatal
one; it rendered a translation like Mr. Long’s necessary. Jeremy
Collier’s work will now be forgotten, and Mr. Long stands master of the
field; but he may be content, at any rate, to leave his predecessor’s
grave unharmed, even if he will not throw upon it, in passing, a handful
of kindly earth.
Another complaint I have against Mr. Long is, that he is not quite
idiomatic and simple enough. It is a little formal, at least, if not
pedantic, to say _Ethic_ and _Dialectic_, instead of _Ethics_ and
_Dialectics_, and to say “_Hellenes_ and Romans” instead of “_Greeks_
and Romans.” And why, too,—the name of Antoninus being preoccupied by
Antoninus Pius,—will Mr. Long call his author Marcus, _Antoninus_
instead of Marcus _Aurelius_? Small as these matters appear, they are
important when one has to deal with the general public, and not with a
small circle of scholars; and it is the general public that the
translator of a short masterpiece on morals, such as is the book of
Marcus Aurelius, should have in view; his aim should be to make Marcus
Aurelius’s work as popular as the _Imitation_, and Marcus Aurelius’s
name as familiar as Socrates’s. In rendering or naming him, therefore,
punctilious accuracy of phrase is not so much to be sought as
accessibility and currency; everything which may best enable the Emperor
and his precepts _vilotare per ora virum_. It is essential to render him
in language perfectly plain and unprofessional, and to call him by the
name by which he is best and most distinctly known. The translators of
the Bible talk of _pence_ and not _denarii_, and the admirers of
Voltaire do not celebrate him under the name of Arouet.
But, after these trifling complaints are made, one must end, as one
began, in unfeigned gratitude to Mr. Long for his excellent and
substantial reproduction in English of an invaluable work. In general
the substantiality, soundness, and precision of Mr. Long’s rendering are
(I will venture, after all, to give my opinion about them) as
conspicuous as the living spirit with which he treats antiquity; and
these qualities are particularly desirable in the translator of a work
like that of Marcus Aurelius, of which the language is often corrupt,
almost always hard and obscure. Any one who wants to appreciate Mr.
Long’s merits as a translator may read, in the original and in Mr.
Long’s translation, the seventh chapter of the tenth book; he will see
how, through all the dubiousness and involved manner of the Greek, Mr.
Long has firmly seized upon the clear thought which is certainly at the
bottom of that troubled wording, and, in distinctly rendering this
thought, has at the same time thrown round its expression a
characteristic shade of painfulness and difficulty which just suits it.
And Marcus Aurelius’s book is one which, when it is rendered so
accurately as Mr. Long renders it, even those who know Greek tolerably
well may choose to read rather in the translation than in the original.
For not only are the contents here incomparably more valuable than the
external form, but this form, the Greek of a Roman, is not exactly one
of those styles which have a physiognomy, which are an essential part of
their author, which stamp an indelible impression of him on the reader’s
mind. An old Lyons commentator finds, indeed, in Marcus Aurelius’s
Greek, something characteristic, something specially firm and imperial;
but I think an ordinary mortal will hardly find this: he will find
crabbed Greek, without any great charm of distinct physiognomy. The
Greek of Thucydides and Plato has this charm, and he who reads them in a
translation, however accurate, loses it, and loses much in losing it;
but the Greek of Marcus Aurelius, like the Greek of the New Testament,
and even more than the Greek of the New Testament, is wanting in it. If
one could be assured that the English Testament were made perfectly
accurate, one might be almost content never to open a Greek Testament
again; and, Mr. Long’s version of Marcus Aurelius being what it is, an
Englishman who reads to live, and does not live to read, may henceforth
let the Greek original repose upon its shelf.
The man whose thoughts Mr. Long has thus faithfully reproduced, is
perhaps the most beautiful figure in history. He is one of those
consoling and hope-inspiring marks, which stand forever to remind our
weak and easily discouraged race how high human goodness and
perseverance have once been carried, and may be carried again. The
interest of mankind is peculiarly attracted by examples of signal
goodness in high places; for that testimony to the worth of goodness is
the most striking which is borne by those to whom all the means of
pleasure and self-indulgence lay open, by those who had at their command
the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. Marcus Aurelius was the
ruler of the grandest of empires; and he was one of the best of men.
Besides him, history presents one or two sovereigns eminent for their
goodness, such as Saint Louis or Alfred. But Marcus Aurelius has, for us
moderns, this great superiority in interest over Saint Louis or Alfred,
that he lived and acted in a state of society modern by its essential
characteristics, in an epoch akin to our own, in a brilliant center of
civilization. Trajan talks of “our enlightened age” just as glibly as
the _Times_ talks of it. Marcus Aurelius thus becomes for us a man like
ourselves, a man in all things tempted as we are. Saint Louis inhabits
an atmosphere of mediæval Catholicism, which the man of the nineteenth
century may admire, indeed, may even passionately wish to inhabit, but
which, strive as he will, he cannot really inhabit. Alfred belongs to a
state of society (I say it with all deference to the _Saturday Review_
critic who keeps such jealous watch over the honor of our Saxon
ancestors) half barbarous. Neither Alfred nor Saint Louis can be morally
and intellectually as near to us as Marcus Aurelius.
The record of the outward life of this admirable man has in it little of
striking incident. He was born at Rome on the 26th of April, in the year
121 of the Christian era. He was nephew and son-in-law to his
predecessor on the throne, Antoninus Pius. When Antoninus died, he was
forty years old, but from the time of his earliest manhood he had
assisted in administering public affairs. Then, after his uncle’s death
in 161, for nineteen years he reigned as emperor. The barbarians were
pressing on the Roman frontier, and a great part of Marcus Aurelius’s
nineteen years of reign was passed in campaigning. His absences from
Rome were numerous and long. We hear of him in Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt,
Greece; but, above all, in the countries on the Danube, where the war
with the barbarians was going on,—in Austria, Moravia, Hungary. In these
countries much of his Journal seems to have been written; parts of it
are dated from them; and there, a few weeks before his fifty-ninth
birthday, he fell sick and died.[23] The record of him on which his fame
chiefly rests is the record of his inward life,—his _Journal_, or
_Commentaries_, or _Meditations_, or _Thoughts_, for by all these names
has the work been called. Perhaps the most interesting of the records of
his outward life is that which the first book of this work supplies,
where he gives an account of his education, recites the names of those
to whom he is indebted for it, and enumerates his obligations to each of
them. It is a refreshing and consoling picture, a priceless treasure for
those, who, sick of the “wild and dreamlike trade of blood and guile,”
which seems to be nearly the whole of what history has to offer to our
view, seek eagerly for that substratum of right thinking and well-doing
which in all ages must surely have somewhere existed, for without it the
continued life of humanity would have been impossible. “From my mother I
learnt piety and beneficence, and abstinence not only from evil deeds
but even from evil thoughts; and further, simplicity in my way of
living, far removed from the habits of the rich.” Let us remember that,
the next time we are reading the sixth satire of Juvenal. “From my tutor
I learnt” (hear it, ye tutors of princes!) “endurance of labor, and to
want little and to work with my own hands, and not to meddle with other
people’s affairs, and not to be ready to listen to slander.” The vices
and foibles of the Greek sophist or rhetorician—the _Græculus
esuriens_—are in everybody’s mind; but he who reads Marcus Aurelius’s
account of his Greek teachers and masters, will understand how it is
that, in spite of the vices and foibles of individual _Græculi_, the
education of the human race owes to Greece a debt which can never be
overrated. The vague and colorless praise of history leaves on the mind
hardly any impression of Antoninus Pius: it is only from the private
memoranda of his nephew that we learn what a disciplined, hard-working,
gentle, wise, virtuous man he was; a man who, perhaps, interests mankind
less than his immortal nephew only because he has left in writing no
record of his inner life,—_caret quia vate sacro_.
-----
Footnote 23:
He died on the 17th of March, A. D. 180.
-----
Of the outward life and circumstances of Marcus Aurelius, beyond these
notices which he has himself supplied, there are few of much interest
and importance. There is the fine anecdote of his speech when he heard
of the assassination of the revolted Avidius Cassius, against whom he
was marching; _he was sorry_, he said, _to be deprived of the pleasure
of pardoning him_. And there are one or two more anecdotes of him which
show the same spirit. But the great record for the outward life of a man
who has left such a record of his lofty inward aspirations as that which
Marcus Aurelius has left, is the clear consenting voice of all his
contemporaries,—high and low, friend and enemy, pagan and Christian,—in
praise of his sincerity, justice, and goodness. The world’s charity does
not err on the side of excess, and here was a man occupying the most
conspicuous station in the world, and professing the highest possible
standard of conduct;—yet the world was obliged to declare that he walked
worthily of his profession. Long after his death, his bust was to be
seen in the houses of private men through the wide Roman empire. It may
be the vulgar part of human nature which busies itself with the
semblance and doings of living sovereigns, it is its nobler part which
busies itself with those of the dead; these busts of Marcus Aurelius, in
the homes of Gaul, Britain, and Italy, bear witness, not to the inmates’
frivolous curiosity about princes and palaces, but to their reverential
memory of the passage of a great man upon the earth.
Two things, however, before one turns from the outward to the inward
life of Marcus Aurelius, force themselves upon one’s notice, and demand
a word of comment; he persecuted the Christians, and he had for his son
the vicious and brutal Commodus. The persecution at Lyons, in which
Attalus and Pothinus suffered, the persecution at Smyrna, in which
Polycarp suffered, took place in his reign. Of his humanity, of his
tolerance, of his horror of cruelty and violence, of his wish to refrain
from severe measures against the Christians, of his anxiety to temper
the severity of these measures when they appeared to him indispensable,
there is no doubt: but, on the one hand, it is certain that the letter,
attributed to him, directing that no Christian should be punished for
being a Christian, is spurious; it is almost certain that his alleged
answer to the authorities of Lyons, in which he directs that Christians
persisting in their profession shall be dealt with according to law, is
genuine. Mr. Long seems inclined to try and throw doubt over the
persecution at Lyons, by pointing out that the letter of the Lyons
Christians relating it, alleges it to have been attended by miraculous
and incredible incidents. “A man,” he says, “can only act consistently
by accepting all this letter or rejecting it all, and we cannot blame
him for either.” But it is contrary to all experience to say that
because a fact is related with incorrect additions, and embellishments,
therefore it probably never happened at all; or that it is not, in
general, easy for an impartial mind to distinguish between the fact and
the embellishments. I cannot doubt that the Lyons persecution took
place, and that the punishment of Christians for being Christians was
sanctioned by Marcus Aurelius. But then I must add that nine modern
readers out of ten, when they read this, will, I believe, have a
perfectly false notion of what the moral action of Marcus Aurelius, in
sanctioning that punishment, really was. They imagine Trajan, or
Antoninus Pius, or Marcus Aurelius, fresh from the perusal of the
Gospel, fully aware of the spirit and holiness of the Christian saints
ordering their extermination because he loved darkness rather than
light. Far from this, the Christianity which these emperors aimed at
repressing was, in their conception of it, something philosophically
contemptible, politically subversive, and morally abominable. As men,
they sincerely regarded it much as well-conditioned people, with us,
regard Mormonism; as rulers, they regarded it much as Liberal statesmen,
with us, regard the Jesuits. A kind of Mormonism, constituted as a vast
secret society, with obscure aims of political and social subversion,
was what Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius believed themselves to be
repressing when they punished Christians. The early Christian apologists
again and again declare to us under what odious imputations the
Christians lay, how general was the belief that these imputations were
well-grounded, how sincere was the horror which the belief inspired. The
multitude, convinced that the Christians were atheists who ate human
flesh and thought incest no crime, displayed against them a fury so
passionate as to embarrass and alarm their rulers. The severe
expressions of Tacitus, _exitiabilis superstitio—odio humani generis
convicti_, show how deeply the prejudices of the multitude imbued the
educated class also. One asks oneself with astonishment how a doctrine
so benign as that of Jesus Christ can have incurred misrepresentation so
monstrous. The inner and moving cause of the misrepresentation lay, no
doubt, in this,—that Christianity was a new spirit in the Roman world,
destined to act in that world as its dissolvent; and it was inevitable
that Christianity in the Roman world, like democracy in the modern
world, like every new spirit with a similar mission assigned to it,
should at its first appearance occasion an instinctive shrinking and
repugnance in the world which it was to dissolve. The outer and palpable
causes of the misrepresentation were, for the Roman public at large, the
confounding of the Christians with the Jews, that isolated, fierce, and
stubborn race, whose stubbornness, fierceness, and isolation, real as
they were, the fancy of a civilized Roman yet further exaggerated; the
atmosphere of mystery and novelty which surrounded the Christian rites;
the very simplicity of Christian theism. For the Roman statesman, the
cause of mistake lay in that character of secret assemblages which the
meetings of the Christian community wore, under a State-system as
jealous of unauthorized associations as in the State-system of modern
France.
A Roman of Marcus Aurelius’s time and position could not well see the
Christians except through the mist of these prejudices. Seen through
such a mist, the Christians appeared with a thousand faults not their
own; but it has not been sufficiently remarked that faults really their
own many of them assuredly appeared with besides, faults especially
likely to strike such an observer as Marcus Aurelius, and to confirm him
in the prejudices of his race, station, and rearing. We look back upon
Christianity after it has proved what a future it bore within it, and
for us the sole representatives of its early struggles are the pure and
devoted spirits through whom it proved this; Marcus Aurelius saw it with
its future yet unshown, and with the tares among its professed progeny
not less conspicuous than the wheat. Who can doubt that among the
professing Christians of the second century, as among the professing
Christians of the nineteenth, there was plenty of folly, plenty of rabid
nonsense, plenty of gross fanaticism? who will even venture to affirm
that, separated in great measure from the intellect and civilization of
the world for one or two centuries, Christianity, wonderful as have been
its fruits, had the development perfectly worthy of its inestimable
germ? Who will venture to affirm that, by the alliance of Christianity
with the virtue and intelligence of men like the Antonines,—of the best
product of Greek and Roman civilization, while Greek and Roman
civilization had yet life and power,—Christianity and the world, as well
as the Antonines themselves, would not have been gainers? That alliance
was not to be. The Antonines lived and died with an utter misconception
of Christianity; Christianity grew up in the Catacombs, not on the
Palatine. And Marcus Aurelius incurs no moral reproach by having
authorized the punishment of the Christians; he does not thereby become
in the least what we mean by a _persecutor_. One may concede that it was
impossible for him to see Christianity as it really was;—as impossible
as for even the moderate and sensible Fleury to see the Antonines as
they really were;—one may concede that the point of view from which
Christianity appeared something anti-civil and anti-social, which the
State had the faculty to judge and the duty to suppress, was inevitably
his. Still, however, it remains true that this sage, who made perfection
his aim and reason his law, did Christianity an immense injustice and
rested in an idea of State-attributes which was illusive. And this is,
in truth, characteristic of Marcus Aurelius, that he is blameless, yet,
in a certain sense, unfortunate; in his character, beautiful as it is,
there is something melancholy, circumscribed, and ineffectual.
For of his having such a son as Commodus, too, one must say that he is
not to be blamed on that account, but that he is unfortunate.
Disposition and temperament are inexplicable things; there are natures
on which the best education and example are thrown away; excellent
fathers may have, without any fault of theirs, incurably vicious sons.
It is to be remembered, also, that Commodus was left, at the perilous
age of nineteen, master of the world; while his father, at that age, was
but beginning a twenty years’ apprenticeship to wisdom, labor, and
self-command, under the sheltering teachership of his uncle Antoninus.
Commodus was a prince apt to be led by favorites; and if the story is
true which says that he left, all through his reign, the Christians
untroubled, and ascribes this lenity to the influence of his mistress
Marcia, it shows that he could be led to good as well as to evil. But
for such a nature to be left at a critical age with absolute power, and
wholly without good counsel and direction, was the more fatal. Still one
cannot help wishing that the example of Marcus Aurelius could have
availed more with his own only son. One cannot but think that with such
virtue as his there should go, too, the ardor which removes mountains,
and that the ardor which removes mountains might have even won Commodus.
The word _ineffectual_ again rises to one’s mind; Marcus Aurelius saved
his own soul by his righteousness, and he could do no more. Happy they
who can do this! but still happier, who can do more!
Yet, when one passes from his outward to his inward life, when one turns
over the pages of his _Meditations_,—entries jotted down from day to
day, amid the business of the city or the fatigues of the camp, for his
own guidance and support, meant for no eye but his own, without the
slightest attempt at style, with no care, even, for correct writing, not
to be surpassed for naturalness and sincerity,—all disposition to carp
and cavil dies away, and one is overpowered by the charm of a character
of such purity, delicacy, and virtue. He fails neither in small things
nor in great; he keeps watch over himself both that the great springs of
action may be right in him, and that the minute details of action may be
right also. How admirable in a hard-tasked ruler, and a ruler too, with
a passion for thinking and reading, is such a memorandum as the
following:—
“Not frequently nor without necessity to say to any one, or to write in
a letter, that I have no leisure; nor continually to excuse the neglect
of duties required by our relation to those with whom we live, by
alleging urgent occupation.”
And, when that ruler is a Roman emperor, what an “idea” is this to be
written down and meditated by him:—
“The idea of a polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity
administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech,
and the idea of a kingly government which respects most of all the
freedom of the governed.”
And, for all men who “drive at practice,” what practical rules may not
one accumulate out of these _Meditations_:—-
“The greatest part of what we say or do being unnecessary, if a man
takes this away, he will have more leisure and less uneasiness.
Accordingly, on every occasion a man should ask himself: ‘Is this one of
the unnecessary things?’ Now a man should take away not only unnecessary
acts, but also unnecessary thoughts, for thus superfluous acts will not
follow after.”