‘O for the soul ready, when the hour of dissolution comes, for extinction or dispersion or survival! But such readiness must proceed from inward conviction[143].’
‘Serenely you await the end, be it extinction or transmutation. While the hour yet tarries, what help is there? what, but to reverence and bless the gods, to do good to men, “to endure and to refrain”? and of all that lies outside the bounds of flesh and breath, to remember that it is not yours, nor in your power[144].’
His yearnings.
142. Aurelius was no teacher of Stoicism in his time: his thoughts are addressed to himself alone[145]. But the happy accident that has preserved this work, which for nine centuries was lost to sight[146], enables us to obtain a view of this philosophy from which otherwise we should have been shut out. We do not go to Aurelius to learn what Stoic doctrine was; this is taken for granted throughout the book; but we can see here how it affected a man in whom the intellectual outlook was after all foreshortened by sympathies and yearnings which had grown up in his nature. The traditional criticism of the school as being harsh, unsympathetic, unfeeling, breaks to pieces as we read these ‘thoughts’; rather we find an excess of emotion, a surrender to human weakness. A study of Stoicism based on the works of Aurelius alone would indeed give us but a one-sided picture; but a study in which they were omitted would certainly lack completeness. He is also our last authority. In the centuries which succeeded, other waves of philosophic thought washed over Stoicism, and contended in turn with more than one religion which pressed in from the East. Yet for a long time to come Stoic principles were faithfully inculcated in thousands of Roman homes, and young men taught in childhood to model their behaviour upon the example of Zeno, Cleanthes, and Epictetus formed the salt of the Roman world. If in riper years they joined, in ever increasing numbers, the Christian church, they brought with them something which the world could not afford to lose.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Dill, Roman Society, p. 340.
[2] ‘omnis natura habet quasi viam quandam et sectam quam sequatur’ Cic. N. D. ii 22, 57. ‘est tuae prudentiae sequi eius auctoritatem, cuius sectam atque imperium secutus es’ ad Fam. xiii 4, 2. ‘The sense of the word has been obscured by a false popular etymology which has connected the word with the Latin secare ‘to cut,’ Skeat, Etymological Dictionary, p. 537.
[4] ‘dicebat modesta Diogenes et sobria’ A. Gellius N. A. vi (vii) 14, 10.
[5] For a full account of his life and teaching see Schmekel, Philosophie der mittleren Stoa, pp. 1-9.