During this journey of pacification, he lost his wife Faustina, who died suddenly in one of the valleys of Mount Taurus. History, or the collection of anecdotes which at this period often passes as history, has assigned to Faustina a character of the darkest infamy, and it has even been made a charge against Aurelius that he overlooked or condoned her offences. As far as Faustina is concerned, we have not much to say, although there is strong reason to believe that many of the stories told of her are scandalously exaggerated, if not absolutely false. Certain it is, that most of the imputations upon her memory rest on the malignant anecdotes recorded by Dion, who dearly loved every piece of scandal which degraded human nature. The specific charge brought against her of having tempted Cassius from his allegiance is wholly unsupported, even if it be not absolutely incompatible with what we find in her own existent letters; and, finally, Marcus himself not only loved her tenderly, as the kind mother of his eleven children, but in his Meditations actually thanks the gods for having granted him "such a wife, so obedient so affectionate, and so simple." No doubt Faustina was unworthy of her husband; but surely it is the glory and not the shame of a noble nature to be averse from jealousy and suspicion, and to trust to others more deeply than they deserve.
So blameless was the conduct of Marcus Aurelius that neither the malignity of contemporaries nor the sprit of posthumous scandal has succeeded in discovering any flaw in the extreme integrity of his life and principles. But meanness will not be baulked of its victims. The hatred of all excellence which made Caligula try to put down the memory of great men rages, though less openly, in the minds of many. They delight to degrade human life into that dull and barren plain "in which every molehill is a mountain, and every thistle a forest-tree." Great men are as small in their eyes as they are said to be in the eyes of their valets; and there are multitudes who, if they find
"Some stain or blemish in a name of note,
Not grieving that their greatest are so small,
Innate themselves with some insane delight,
And judge all nature from her feet of clay,
Without the will to lift their eyes, and see
Her godlike head crown'd with spiritual fire,
And touching other worlds."
This I suppose is the reason why, failing to drag down Marcus Aurelius from his moral elevation, some have attempted to assail his reputation because of the supposed vileness of Faustina and the actual depravity of Commodus. Of Faustina I have spoken already. Respecting Commodus, I think it sufficient to ask with Solomon: "Who knoweth whether his son shall be a wise man or a fool?" Commodus was but nineteen when his father died; for the first three years of his reign he ruled respectably and acceptably. Marcus Aurelius had left no effort untried to have him trained aright by the first teachers and the wisest men whom the age produced; and Herodian distinctly tells us that he had lived virtuously up to the time of his father's death. Setting aside natural affection altogether, and even assuming (as I should conjecture from one or two passages of his Meditations) that Marcus had misgivings about his son, would it have been easy, would it have been even possible, to set aside on general grounds a son who had attained to years of maturity? However this may be, if there are any who think it worth while to censure Marcus because, after all, Commodus turned out to be but "a warped slip of wilderness," their censure is hardly sufficiently discriminating to deserve the trouble of refutation.
"But Marcus Aurelius cruelly persecuted the Christians." Let us briefly consider this charge. That persecutions took place in his reign is an undeniable fact, and is sufficiently evidenced by the Apologies of Justin Martyr, of Melito Bishop of Sardis, of Athenagoras, and of Apollinarius, as well as by the Letter of the Church of Smyrna describing the martyrdom of Polycarp, and that of the Churches of Lyons and Vienne to their brethren in Asia Minor. It is fair, however, to mention that there is some documentary evidence on the other side; Lactantius clearly asserts that under the reigns of those excellent princes who succeeded Domitian the Church suffered no violence from her enemies, and "spread her hands towards the East and the West:" Tertullian, writing but twenty years after the death of Marcus, distinctly says (and Eusebius quotes the assertion), that there were letters of the Emperor, in which he not only attributed his delivery among the Quadi to the prayers of Christian soldiers in the "Thundering Legion," but ordered any who informed against the Christians to be most severely punished; and at the end of the works of Justin Martyr is found a letter of similar purport, which is asserted to have been addressed by Marcus to the Senate of Rome. We may set aside these peremptory testimonies, we may believe that Tertullian and Eusebius were mistaken, and that the documents to which they referred were spurious; but this should make us also less certain about the prominent participation of the Emperor in these persecutions. My own belief is (and it is a belief which could be supported by many critical arguments), that his share in causing them was almost infinitesimal. If those who love his memory reject the evidence of Fathers in his favour, they may be at least permitted to withhold assent from some of the assertions in virtue of which he is condemned.
Marcus in his Meditations alludes to the Christians once only, and then it is to make a passing complaint of the indifference to death, which appeared to him, as it appeared to Epictetus, to arise, not from any noble principles, but from mere obstinacy and perversity. That he shared the profound dislike with which Christians were regarded is very probable. That he was a cold-blooded and virulent persecutor is utterly unlike his whole character, essentially at variance with his habitual clemency, alien to the spirit which made him interfere in every possible instance to mitigate the severity of legal punishments, and may in short be regarded as an assertion which is altogether false. Who will believe that a man who during his reign built and dedicated but one single temple, and that a Temple to Beneficence; that a man who so far from showing any jealousy respecting foreign religions allowed honour to be paid to them all; that a man whose writings breathe on every page the inmost spirit of philanthropy and tenderness, went out of his way to join in a persecution of the most innocent, the most courageous, and the most inoffensive of his subjects?
The true state of the case seems to have been this. The deep calamities in which, during the whole reign of Marcus the Empire was involved, caused widespread distress, and roused into peculiar fury the feelings of the provincials against men whose atheism (for such they considered it to be) had kindled the anger of the gods. This fury often broke out into paroxisms of popular excitement, which none but the firmest-minded governers were able to moderate or to repress. Marcus, when appealed to, simply let the existing law take its usual course. That law was as old as the time of Trajan. The young Pliny, Governor of Bithynia, had written to ask Trajan how he was to deal with the Christians, whose blamelessness of life he fully admitted, but whose doctrines, he said, had emptied the temples of the gods, and exasperated their worshippers. Trajan in reply had ordered that the Christians should not be sought for, but that, if they were brought before the governor, and proved to be contumacious in refusing to adjure their religion, they were then to be put to death. Hadrian and Antoninus Pius had continued the same policy, and Marcus Aurilius saw no reason to alter it. But this law, which in quiet times might become a mere dead letter, might at more troubled periods be converted into a dangerous engine of persecution, as it was in the case of the venerable Polycarp, and in the unfortunate Churches of Lyons and Vienne. The Pagans believed that the reason why their gods were smiling in secret,--
"Looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery
sands,--
"Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying
hands,--"
was the unbelief and impiety of these hated Galileans, causes of offence which could only be expiated by the death of the guilty. "Their enemies," says Tertullian, "call aloud for the blood of the innocent, alleging this vain pretext for their hatred, that they believe the Christians to be the cause of every public misfortune. If the Tiber has overflowed its banks, or the Nile has not overflowed, if heaven has refused its rain, if famine or the plague has spread its ravages, the cry is immediate, 'The Christians to the lions.'" In the first three centuries the cry of "No Christianity" became at times as brutal, as violent, and as unreasoning as the cry of "No Popery" has often been in modern days. It was infinitely less disgraceful to Marcus to lend his ear to the one than it has been to some eminent modern statesmen to be carried away by the insensate fury of the other.