_The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus._ Translated by GEORGE LONG. London: Bell & Daldy.
Dulness is usually reckoned the prescriptive right of kings; at least, they are supposed to be officially incapable of literary eminence. And yet it is a curious fact, that, of those idiomatic works which literature will not "let die," of those marked productions which survive by their individuality, three, at least, bear the impress of royal names.
Devotion has found, in the contributions of three thousand years, no utterance so fit as the lyrics of a Hebrew king; satiety has breathed no sigh so profound as "The Words of the Preacher, the Son of David, King of Jerusalem"[31]; and the wisdom of the Stoics has no worthier exponent than the meditations of a sovereign who ruled the greatest empire known to history, and glorified it with his own imperial spirit,--the noblest that ever bore the burden of state.
Our third example, unlike the other two, has not been adopted by ecclesiastical authority, and is not incorporated in any Vulgate of sacred lore; but its place in the canon of philosophy has long been established, and is often confirmed by fresh recognition. A new translation of this celebrated work, of which several versions already existed, has just been given to the English public by Mr. George Long, a well-known scholar and critic, with the title above named. We should have preferred the old title, "Meditations," so long endeared; but we are none the less grateful to Mr. Long for this needful service, for which no ordinary qualifications were required, and which has never before been performed by such competent hands.
Gibbon has said, that, "if a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus." This period comprises, together with the four concluding years of the first century of the Christian era, four-fifths of the second. The last of these fifths, deducting one year, (A.D. 161-180,) was occupied by the supreme rule of Annios Verus, better known by his assumed name of Marcus Ælius Aurelius Antoninus, fifteenth emperor of the Romans, nephew and successor of another Antoninus, whose virtues, and especially his grateful remembrance of his predecessor and benefactor, procured him the _agnomen_ of "Pius." In a line of sovereigns which numbers a larger proportion of wise and good men than most dynasties, perhaps than any other, M. Antoninus ranks first, so far as those qualities are concerned. A man of singular and sublime virtue, whose imperial station, so trying to human character, but served to render more conspicuous his rare and transcendent excellence. With an empire such as never before or since the Augustan dynasty has fallen to the lot of an individual, lord of the civilized earth, he lived simply and abstemiously as the poorest citizen in his dominions, frugal with unlimited means, humble with unlimited sway. Not a Christian by profession, in piety toward God and charity toward man he was yet a better Christian in fact than any of the Christian emperors who succeeded him. He governed his life by the Stoic discipline, the most hardy, in its practical requirements, of ancient systems, so rigorous in its ethic that Josephus is proud to claim an affinity with it for the "straitest" of the Jewish sects, and so pure in its spirit that St. Jerome ranks its best-known writer as a Christian,--a philosophy which taught men to consider virtue as the only good, vice as the only evil, all external things as indifferent. "His life," says Gibbon, "was the noblest commentary on the precepts of Zeno. He was severe to himself, indulgent to the imperfections of others, just and beneficent to all mankind. He regretted that Avidius Cassius, who had excited a rebellion in Syria, had by a voluntary death deprived him of the pleasure of converting an enemy into a friend. War he detested as the disgrace and calamity of human nature; but when the necessity of a just defence called upon him to take up arms, he readily exposed his person to eight winter campaigns on the frozen banks of the Danube, the severity of which was at last fatal to the weakness of his constitution. His memory was revered by a grateful posterity, and above a century after his death there were many who preserved the image of Marcus Antoninus among their household gods."