LAST DAYS IN ROME
The hasty summons to the East which interrupted Marcus’ northern
campaign was due to the revolt of one of his best generals, Avidius
Cassius.
Cassius until now had been loyal to the Emperor and had served him well
in the war against the Parthians. In that war the worthless debauchee
Lucius Verus, Marcus’ colleague, had been nominally in command, but
really confined his campaigns to the voluptuous groves of Daphne,
while Cassius bore the brunt of the fight. Further, Cassius had by
iron discipline restored the efficiency of the Eastern legions. At
first, like all reformers, he was cordially hated; this hatred found
expression in mutiny; but, on this being suppressed, gave place to
respect and even to popularity. It were well for Cassius had he
confined his zeal for reform to the army; but he wished to reform the
Emperor and the court also. His murmurings became public property, and
Lucius Verus wrote to Marcus warning him against him: “I would you had
him closely watched. For he is a general disliker of us and of our
doings; he is gathering together an enormous treasure, and he makes
an open jest of our literary pursuits. You, for instance, he calls
a philosophising old woman, and me a dissolute buffoon and a scamp.
Consider what you would have done. For my part I bear the fellow no
ill-will; but again I say take care that he does not do mischief to you
and to your children.”
The answer of Marcus gives a most searching insight into his character.
Steeped in the most obstinately logical fatalism, it is yet generous
and noble and “breathes the very soul of careless magnanimity reposing
upon conscious innocence”:--
“I have read your letter, and I will confess to you I think it more
scrupulously timid than becomes an Emperor, and timid in a way
unsuitable to the spirit of our times. Consider this--if the Empire is
destined to Cassius by the decrees of Providence, in that case it will
not be in our power to put him to death, however much we may desire
to do so. You know your great-grandfather’s saying, ‘No prince ever
killed his own heir’; no man, that is, ever yet prevailed against one
whom Providence had marked out as his successor. On the other hand, if
Providence opposes him, then, without any cruelty on our part, he will
fall spontaneously into some snare prepared for him by destiny.... For
Cassius, then, let him keep his present temper and inclinations, and
the more so, being (as he is) a good general, austere in discipline,
brave, and one whom the State cannot afford to lose. For as to what
you insinuate, that I ought to provide for my children’s interests, by
putting this man judiciously out of the way, very frankly I say to you,
‘Perish, my children, if Avidius shall deserve more attachment than
they, and if it shall prove salutary to the State that Cassius should
triumph rather than that the children of Marcus should survive.’”
Gradually Cassius had been strengthening his forces; and at length in
A.D. 175 openly raised the standard of revolt against the reign of
the philosophers. His manifesto shows how deeply the military party
resented the ascendancy of men who seemed to have no qualification for
office except their long beards and eccentric life. Jibes such as this
were common: “His beard is worth ten thousand sesterces to him; come,
we shall have to pay goats a salary next!” Avidius admits that Marcus
is a worthy man, but he is letting the State go to ruin, while “hungry
blood-suckers batten on her vitals.” He longs for the old strict regime
of Cato. “Marcus Antoninus is a scholar; he enacts the philosopher;
and he tries conclusions concerning the four elements and upon the
nature of the soul; and he discourses learnedly upon the _Honestum_;
and concerning the _Summum Bonum_ he is unanswerable. Meanwhile, is
he learned in the interests of the State? Can he argue a point upon
the public economy?” And he adds: “You see what a host of sabres is
required, what a host of impeachments, sentences, executions, before
the commonwealth can resume its ancient integrity!”
A rumour that Marcus was dead hastened the outbreak of the revolt and
won support for Cassius. But it was quickly contradicted; and this
caused the collapse of his forces. Officers and men deserted him, and
he was at length assassinated by one of his own followers.
Meanwhile Marcus was coming with all haste from the Danube, accompanied
by Faustina. When they reached Cappadocia, at the foot of Mount Taurus,
Faustina died, to his great grief, and the tongues of the slanderers
were silent at length. The last accusation against her was that she
had been privy to this very revolt, and had promised to marry Cassius
in the event of its success. But to all these charges we must give
a verdict of “not proven”; they are for the most part unreliable
gossip of the most gossiping of historians. But even though she was
not guilty of all that was laid to her charge, yet she seems to have
wearied of the over-wisdom of Marcus and his friends: she lived a
different life and had different tastes from his. Yet even after her
death Marcus cherished her memory. He had a temple built to her honour
on the spot where she died, and at his request the Senate decreed her
deification. The visitor to Rome may still see in the Capitoline Museum
a bas-relief in which she is represented being borne up to heaven by
Fame, while Marcus follows her from the earth with that look of tender,
wistful pathos which characterises most of the representations of
him. In decreeing these honours, as also in establishing an institute
for orphans to be called _Faustinianæ_, after her name, he was but
following step by step the action of his father Antoninus on the death
of the elder Faustina.
When Marcus reached Antioch the revolt was already ended. One of the
assassins, hoping for reward, brought the head of Cassius to the
Emperor; but he put him from him with indignation and loathing. His one
regret was that he had been deprived of the pleasure of pardoning his
enemy.
But the good deed was done, if not to Cassius, at any rate to his wife
and relatives. Many urged him to wreak his vengeance on them. Faustina,
before her death, had insisted that he “should show no mercy to men
that showed none to you, nor would have shown any to me or my sons in
case they had gained the victory”; she would have had him punish the
army also severely as accomplices. Marcus replied that he admired her
zeal for their family, but said that he would spare Cassius’ wife and
children and son-in-law and commend them to the mercy of the Senate.
As to his other relatives: “Why should I speak of pardon to them, who
indeed have done no wrong, and are blameless even in purpose.” The
Senate granted his requests, and the household of Cassius was amply
provided for by the generosity of the Emperor.
We are wont to think of the forgiving to seventy times seven times
as the peculiar and most characteristic virtue of Christianity as it
assuredly is the most beautiful of the natural virtues. Yet it was
a virtue familiar to the wise ones of the Stoics, and perhaps not a
difficult virtue to those who adopted their philosophy of life. If
nothing matters and all is in very truth but vanity of vanities and the
soul is steeped in this conviction, the disposition to look on life’s
worries, whatever their sources, as but petty and trifling, is natural
and spontaneous. For one with the Stoic temperament hard things are but
the whetstone of the will, and herein precisely lies the danger of that
temperament from the Christian point of view. The Stoic will, if not
well-ordered, is a harsh grinding thing which sucks in and crushes the
beautiful things of life as grist beneath its wheels. It exults in its
strength with a forbidding and unlovely pride, so different from the
beautiful diffidence of Christian strength, which loves not the beauty
of the creatures less, but the beauty of the Creator more, and with a
kind of supernatural Epicureanism renounces the beauty of the fleeting
for the sake of the beauty of which it is but an image far removed, the
beauty of Him whose beauty is older than the hills and will abide when
they have crumbled away.
It is to the credit of Marcus Aurelius that even in this he avoided
to a great extent the faults of his virtues; it is the touch of
emotion in his writings and in those of the other later Stoics of the
Empire which gives them their charm beyond the earlier members of the
school. We have many indications that his soul was open to the ἀπορροὴ
τοῦ κάλλους, the inflow of beauty from sensible things, while his
correspondence with Fronto shows that his nature was affectionate.
Throughout the Meditations also we see the reflection of the constant
struggle which he had with his own nature. One who did not feel deeply
would never have insisted so much on the necessity for control of the
feelings. It is a fallacy to think that the Stoic is necessarily dead
to humanity. In a sense, and in theory at least, he is the truest lover
of man and the human. His sole vocation in life is the good of the
whole; the _caritas generis humani_ (love for his fellow-men), if not
the central point of their system and far from the Christian ideal of
charity in beauty and efficacy, yet was present and active in them.
The Stoic must check his feelings but not suppress them. It suffices
that the barrier of the will be raised and strengthened day by day and
then the feelings may surge up behind it, ready for right use; but as
servants not as masters. Thus the paradox is true that those have often
the strongest emotions whose emotions are most in check.
On his way back from the East the Emperor passed through Athens. There
he found much that attracted him and much that repelled. The schools
of philosophy were his chief interest, but he liked not their sophisms
and disputations, and the irresponsibility which seemed irreverent
towards the true philosophy whose end was life. When he thinks of
the dialecticians of his day he thanks the gods that he did not make
more proficiency in rhetoric, poetry, and the other studies “in which
I should perhaps have been completely engaged, if I had seen that I
was making progress in them.” He thinks with gratitude of Rusticus as
having taught him “not to be led astray to sophistic emulation, nor
to writing on speculative matters, nor to delivering little hortatory
orations, nor to showing myself off as a man who practises much
discipline or does benevolent acts in order to make a display; and to
abstain from rhetoric and fine-writing.” “_Quid tibi de generibus et
speciebus?_” said à Kempis.
But though the spirit of the schools was repugnant to his sincerity,
yet, true to his leading principle of fostering culture, he founded
several chairs in what we may call the University of Athens.
While at Athens he was also initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries.
This act was not with him merely an act of State-policy, an act of
condescension to an alien religion such as other Emperors often showed;
nor was it, as it was with Hadrian, the outcome of a restless desire
to pry into the novel and the mysterious. With Marcus Aurelius it was
probably a sincere act of religion. There was much in the symbolism
and ritual of the mysteries, its hymns and processions and dramatic
representations resembling the mystery plays of the Middle Ages, in its
fasting and nightly torchlight processions by the sea-shore and through
the plain, which would appeal to his ritualistic nature. The doctrines
of expiation and a future life, the καλαὶ ἐλπίδες--the fair hopes of
Eleusis, must have had an especial attraction for him.
As to his own religious views, he certainly was not the Agnostic which
Renan would have him be. “In every time and place,” he says, “it
rests with thyself to use the event of the hour religiously: at all
seasons worship the gods.” He asserts that it is impious to deny the
existence of the gods, and he rests his theories of right and wrong
on the supposition of their existence. True, as Renan points out, he
often holds out to himself the alternative of their non-existence,
but even then it is only to assert the existence of the Divinity in
another form. He says that if they did not exist, yet truth to our own
nature would be a sufficient motive for right action; but our nature
is for him but a part of the nature which is Divine, and derives its
sanction from its participation in this supreme nature. His religion
was a strange mixture of monotheism, polytheism, and pantheism;
but to atheism he never really consents. Strictly speaking, he had
no philosophy or theology; for he was not interested in systems as
such. Yet he never wavered in his loyalty to the national religion,
however much or little of it he really believed when he stood at the
sacrificial altar in pontifical robes and chanted the ancient hymns and
formularies, all of which he knew by heart.
Indeed, he was more deeply interested in the practical than in the
pure reason; and conduct was more for him than dogma: hence it is
that his thoughts are so intensely human and universal in their
appeal. His nature, however, had little in common with the light and
frivolous agnosticism of Renan and the dilettanti; and only a very
subjective interpretation of the Meditations can eliminate from them
the “supernatural” element. Renan recognises this element to a certain
extent, and accounts it a blemish “which, however, does not affect
the marvellous beauty of the work as a whole.” It is for him, as for
Matthew Arnold, the gospel of those who walk by sight and not by faith,
“who have no faith in the supernatural”; and it “will never grow old
because it affirms no dogma.”
It is useless to inquire further into the nature of his religious
beliefs. He would have been at a loss to define them himself. The
great salient feature is here as elsewhere the tragedy of a great moral
nature in the throes of superstition, of a beautiful life deprived of
its fit setting: a tragedy too common in our own days filling wide
spaces with spiritual waste and hopeless sighs, and making hearts
desolate for that their light is gone out or flickers low.
On his return to Rome, Marcus celebrated a splendid triumph, shared in
by Commodus, over the conquered German peoples. It was against his own
better feelings and in concession to Roman vulgarity that he endured
this ordeal. He often expresses his disgust for these functions and,
as we have seen, regarded conquerors as no better than robbers. The
shouts of the mob, the long train of captives, the reeking public
banquets were little to his taste; and for him there was no need of the
attendant who usually stood behind the conqueror on the triumphal car
to remind him that he was a man lest he should perhaps bring down on
himself the wrath of the gods by an unseemly arrogance.
There was less need than ever on this day; for with Commodus by his
side a great sorrow overshadowed him. He had nominated Commodus as his
successor to avoid a worse evil--the evil of civil war, which would
certainly have arisen had he chosen one more worthy from his own
philosophic circle. Yet Commodus, though still a youth, had already
given full reign to his passions; and Marcus can scarcely have failed
to foresee the disaster which he was to bring upon the Empire. The
shadow of this sorrow and of the great loneliness which was his during
his later years, grows darker and darker over the last books of the
Meditations.
As Renan has remarked, they have but one thought, that of passing
as gently as may be from the world. In the earlier books he gathers
strength for the struggle of life; now all is preparation for death.
The evil plight of public affairs also justified this world-weariness.
The signs of decay were already visible in Rome: the handwriting had
been seen on the walls of the Capitol. Even Renan has to admit that
“in reality the progress effected during the reigns of Antoninus and
Marcus Aurelius had been merely superficial. It had been limited to a
varnish of hypocrisy and external professions, which people assumed
in order to be in harmony with the two wise Emperors. The masses were
grossly materialistic; the army was decaying; the laws alone had been
changed for the better.” Plague, famine, and war had done their work
of death. Marcus did all he could to alleviate the misery; but bad
finance had left him helpless to cope with such universal disaster. And
to fill his cup of bitterness news was brought that his old enemies on
the Danube were in arms again. He must needs, ill and heartsick though
he was, gird himself once more and prepare to leave Rome for the wild
North--this time never to return.