CHAPTER VIII. “the End of the Old World”

“THE END OF THE OLD WORLD”

The peace hastily made in A.D. 175 was broken two years later. The local commanders again proved incompetent to drive back the barbarian hordes, and Marcus had once more to assume the command in person. This time he decided to take with him Commodus, in the hope perhaps that, like so many of the Roman nobles, worthless at home, he might develop in the provinces those powers for government and war which were innate in that race of rulers; or, at the very least, in the hope of strengthening him against effeminate influences by the hard northern winters and the privations of camp life.

Before leaving Rome the Emperor gave a pitiful exhibition of his powerlessness to diffuse the light of his own philosophy amongst his subjects; or else of the strange grip, growing stronger as the shades drew round him, which the pagan superstitions had upon his soul. For seven days before his departure the city was the scene of the wildest religious extravagances. The older gods of the West shared the honours with their lighter brethren from the East and South. The number of white steers sacrificed was so great that some of the wits circulated an epigrammatical petition from them to the Emperor: “The white oxen to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius: If you return as conqueror, that will be the end of us.” Sumptuous feasts were prepared before every temple at which the statues of the gods reclined: and Rome reeled in mad revel. Quacks from all parts of the Empire gathered in Rome and flourished during those days.

Lucian has left us a vivid picture of one of these. This was Alexander of Abonoteichos, the prince of impostors. He had started a new religion in Paphlagonia with mysteries and rites based on those of Eleusis. This had quickly spread over the East; and with the other Eastern impostures found a welcome at Rome. Rutilianus, a Roman senator of consular rank, became its patron and zealous advocate. The new mysteries were celebrated during three days with scenes of wild excitement and immorality. Even the friends of Marcus and Marcus himself were deceived. During the Northern wars, at a word from Alexander’s sacred serpent, Marcus had solemnly presided in the robes of the Pontifex Maximus over a most ridiculous ceremony. The Romans were assured that if they cast two lions alive into the Danube they would be victorious over the enemy arrayed against them on the opposite bank. The lions were cast in with all ceremony; but, unfortunately for Alexander’s reputation and Marcus’ credulity, they were beaten to death on reaching the other bank, and the Romans, when they crossed, fared no better.

The Emperor went through a ceremony at this time which must have been no less revolting to him than it is to us. This was the ancient ceremony of the casting of the dart, a ceremony almost as old as Rome itself. The Emperor went in procession to the temple of Bellona, surrounded by a mob of fanatics, who cut into their living flesh with knives and whips and then lapped the streaming blood--to honour and placate their Goddess of War! Arrived at the Temple he hurled the dart towards the North--where his enemies were already pressing his armies hard.

When he had done all that he considered necessary to appease the gods or to soothe the superstitious fears of his subjects, Marcus at length set out for the scene of war in A.D. 178. Of this war very little is known. The dream of Augustus and many of the other Emperors, given up as hopeless by them--the extension of the Roman frontier to the Elbe and the consolidation of Roman power in the North--was almost realised. But the Dark Shadow which had crossed Marcus’ path so often before drew nigh once more and for the last time. On the eve of a great and, it would seem, a final conquest, illness and death conquered the Conqueror.

It was in the spring of A.D. 180 that the plague which had taken off half the population of the Empire came to claim the life of the Emperor. He fell ill, probably at Vienna, on the 10th of March. His constitution had never been robust and the hardships of the last years had still further weakened it. Hence he recognised immediately that this illness was to be unto death; and is said to have at once welcomed its approach. Continual disappointment had killed all hope within him, and with hope the pain of hope unfulfilled; and so he had no regrets now that that strange spirit which had ever dogged him once more passed by at midnight over the dreary northern plains and entering into his tent dashed the cup of victory from his lips. He asked Commodus as a last request to complete the war and then prepared for the end. For seven days the illness lasted. On the sixth he bade farewell to his friends. He spoke to them of the vanity of life and the easiness of death; commended to them the interests of the State and Commodus, “if he should prove worthy”; and all this with a great calm. On the seventh day he would see nobody except Commodus, and him only for a short time, with a last despairing hope perhaps of inspiring at least one noble sentiment into that monster of brutality. Then he seemed to sleep; and his sleep deepened into death.

It was a death free from pomp, lonely and detached as his life had been. But death, in whatever form it came, seems to have had no terrors for him. He had often faced the thought of it and always to persuade himself that in it there was nothing to fear, but perhaps much to hope for.

His confidence in facing death sprang from no sure hope of personal immortality. He believed in an immortality for both soul and body and that the gods would care for both; but whether the life beyond would be a continuance of the personal life of time, or whether this human soul should be swallowed up in the great world-soul he knew not. “You have embarked upon life: when you have made your voyage debark without more ado. If you happen to land in another world there will be gods to take care of you there; but if it be your fortune to drop into nothingness, why then you will be no more solicited with pleasure and pain. Then you will have done drudging for your outer covering, which is the more unworthy in proportion as that which serves it is worthy: for the one is all soul, intelligence and divinity, whereas the other is dirt and corruption.”

Yet elsewhere, though admitting the possibility of the absorption of the human soul into the world-soul he rejects the possibility of utter annihilation. “What is sprung from earth dissolves to earth again and heaven-born things fly to their native seat.” But again he adds: “When a man dies, and the spirit is let loose into the air, it holds out for some time, after which it is changed, diffused, or knotted into flame, or else absorbed into the generative principle of the Universe.” This is the best he can promise us: yet how miserable a mockery of human aspirations it is! how unsatisfying to the longings of the soul, which seeks in the spiritual for the most truly and intensely real and in the spiritual and the spiritualised, thus truly real, for the truest beauty!

A philosophy which takes the brightness out of both lives, here and beyond, reducing both to a dull grey mist, can never be a spiritual force, and, if it prevailed, must result in the reversal of all ordinary judgments of value. This was a conclusion frankly accepted by the Stoics, and they carried it even to the extent of the abnegation of man’s most absorbing desire--the will to live. A man may even deny this: for adequate cause he may, nay, even should, take away his own life. In ordinary circumstances man should stand at his post till dismissed by his commander; he should play out the tragedy of life to the end as arranged by the dramatist: for just cause he may quit the stage before his part is played out. The reason is that between life and death there is nothing to choose; they are but successive stages of one and the same natural process. Marcus held that man may quit life if he finds it intolerable. True, he says that life ought not to be intolerable: it is our own fault if it is. But supposing that through weakness we cannot bear it, then “we may give it the slip”; and again because death is not the serious thing men imagine it to be: “What great matter is this business of dying? If the gods exist, you can suffer nothing, for they will do you no harm; and if they do not, or if they take no care of us mortals--why, then a world without gods or providence is not a world worth a man’s while to live in. But in truth the being of the gods and their concern in human affairs is beyond dispute.” If a man is of such a character or placed in such circumstances that for him a virtuous life is morally impossible, then Marcus says he has just cause for suicide, “for reason would rather that you were nothing than that you were a knave.” “You may live now, if you please, as you would choose to do if you were near to dying. But suppose people will not let you--why, then, give life the slip, but by no means make a misfortune of it. If the room smokes, I leave it, and there is an end; for why should one be concerned at the matter?”

Thus did he try by force of argument, often the merest sophistry, to conjure away the dread realities of human existence. But when death called for one after another of his children, he realised how futile his doctrine was. Yet it was the best he could adhere to, and he did but share in the cruel disenchantment that comes sooner or later to all who follow a false philosophy of life. The self-deception which makes these systems plausible in the abstract vanishes at the cold touch of death or at a thrill of love from a kindred heart. All that is most sacred in life, its morality and its ideals, the foundations of society and the aspirations of the individual; the problems that vex men as to the ultimate grounds of obligation, beauty and love; the problems of freedom, of evil and of immortality; the need of the human heart for guidance and support can receive no adequate explanation except in the acceptance of integral Christianity--namely Catholicism. Hence the folly of our neo-pagan revival. Paganism was tried and is dead with the souls and the hopes it slew; the future lies with a vigorous fighting Catholicity. It is vain to attempt to resurrect the corpse which Constantine prepared for burial. Wisdom and duty bid us follow the system which our whole nature cries out for: reason alone or sentiment alone is a blind guide; truth lies in the leading of the whole man.

Yet the moral greatness which Marcus had attained in spite of all the limitations of his system was made very clear by the universal grief and reverence which was expressed at his death. When his body was brought to Rome the whole city went into mourning. Henceforth we are told men spoke of him no longer by his imperial titles, but old men spoke of him as “Marcus, my son”; young men, as “Marcus, my father”; and men of his own age, as “Marcus, my brother”; such was the affection of all for him. The decreeing of divine honours was not in his case, as it was in that of so many of the Emperors, a formality or a burlesque: it was from the heart; the vox populi proclaimed him “propitious god” before the Senate passed the formal decree. And, truly, as St. Augustine said of Plato, we might well pardon the pagans if they raised a temple to him rather than to the gods they honoured. For more than a century after his death his statue was to be seen amongst the household gods in the hearth-shrines of the whole Western Empire, and men looked askance at a chance defaulter to this cult. He was the model of succeeding Emperors, and Christian writers vied with pagans in their praises of him. Even in our own time that strange, melancholy figure is dear to all that know him: there is a pathos and an interest in his life and thoughts which is unique: “Everyone of us wears mourning in his heart for Marcus Aurelius as though he died but yesterday.”

Renan was right in this; but we cannot admit his further statement that “the day of the death of Marcus Aurelius can be taken as the decisive moment at which the ruin of ancient civilisation was decided.” It was decided long before; perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say that the day of Marcus’ accession was the first day of decadence, as it was the last of the old type of Roman rule. But in truth the fate of empires never hangs on a single day or a single ruler. They grow and they decay over long centuries: the seed of life and the rot of death is working long before its effects appear without; and in the reign of Marcus the Empire was already doomed. The old Roman virtues--those especially which form the morale of an imperial race--strict probity, sacrifice of individual interests to the good of the State, initiative, enterprise and the fighting qualities were all dissolving. In their place was being developed the citizen, who is ever the product of centralisation--the man without originality, devotion, or virtue; who is interested in subtlety rather than in truth; wrapped up in his own petty world, incapable of heroism or sacrifice.

In the midst of this death there was a strange stirring of life in the North and in the East--a life which was to feed on the death of the Empire. The forbears of Alaric and his Goths had already knocked at the gate and announced his coming. The eloquent pleadings of the Christian apologists addressed to Marcus himself told of a new stirring in the spiritual and intellectual world--of a new vision which he and his friends could not or would not see; and the brave words and noble deeds of the martyrs told that there was life in this new creed--yes! life and love to conquer Stoic apathy and pagan death.