CHAPTER VII. Last Days in Rome

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.